Pankaj Mishra is the one reason I subscribed to this publication! Without doubt a writer always worth reading, and contemplating, in the immediate retrospect. And as recollection.
‘Cancel Culture’ is the latest political fiction, confected by an utterly corrupt class of apologist for the Present Age of Neo-Liberal collapse, exacerbated by The Pandemic. This is a strictly rhetorical battle against a ‘Mob’, as conceived by a cadre marinating in their own bad faith.
Yesterday, I scanned Janan Ganesh’s latest essay at The Financial Times, that opens with a ‘review’ of sorts of Douglas Boin’s ‘Alaric the Goth’: reduced in the imagination of a writer facing a deadline- who re-writes this as an ancient example of the English “chippiness”. Promise?
https://www.ft.com/content/43e1d489-def7-422c-a8fb-00f4d9e11db9
I am currently reading ‘My Struggle: Book 1’ by Karl Ove Knausgaard: his interpretation of Capote’s ‘Non-Fiction Novel’? I just ordered Mr. Mishra’s ‘The Romantics : A Novel’ as a possible antidote to Knausgaard’s exercise in the demotic. As I read ‘My Struggle’ I just keep thinking of Proust’s ‘Overture’ to Swann’s Way. I’m experiencing a kind of nostalgia for its poetic evocation of his past, as an example of what writing can immediately present to the reader.
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