shame on Updike

a xenofobia literária parece ser uma coisa inacreditável e no entanto lá está ela. porque somos tão crédulos, porque acreditamos no que está escrito, nos canons, nos opinion makers, nos dinosauros do jornalismo. acreditamos porque não sabemos e partimos do princípio que outros sabem melhor. enganar, desviar, adulterar, manipular. pensar pela sua cabeça e ver com os seus próprios olhos, luxos da vida contemporânea.

abaixo, parte da crítica a My Name is Red a que dei cores: todas as palavras que ou não são verdade ou são indicativas de desprezo, palavras que desejam apequenar ou humilhar. shame on Updike, sobre quem Bloom disse The American sublime will never touch his pages. (um pouco da sua própria aspirina)

no NY Times:


Orhan Pamuk is a fifty-year-old Turk frequently hailed as his country's foremost novelist. He is both avant-garde and best-selling. His eminence, like that of the Albanian Ismail Kadare, looms singularly; Western culture-consumers, it may be, don't expect Turkey and Albania to produce novelists at all—at least, novelists so wise in the ways of modernism and postmodernism. Pamuk, the grandson of a wealthy factory director and railroad builder, has been privileged to write without needing to make a living by it. From a family of engineers, he studied engineering, architecture, and journalism, and practiced none of them. Until the age of thirty, he lived with his parents, writing novels that did not get published. When literary success dawned, he married, and now, living in Istanbul with his wife and daughter, he composes, according to an interview he gave Publishers Weekly in 1994, from eleven at night till four in the morning and again, after arising at noon, from two in the afternoon till eight. The results have been prodigious: six novels that recapitulate in Turkish the twentieth-century novel's major modes. His first, "Cevdet Bey and His Sons," was likened to Thomas Mann's "Buddenbrooks"; his next, "The Silent House," a multiply narrated week of family interaction, suggested to critics Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner; his third, "The White Castle," a creepy seventeenth-century tale of double identity, evoked comparison to Borges and Calvino; the fourth, "The Black Book," a missing-persons adventure saturated in details of Istanbul, was written, by Pamuk's own admission, with Joyce's "Ulysses" in mind; the fifth, "The New Life," a dreamlike first-person contemporary tale, was described by a reviewer as "Kafka with a light touch"; and the sixth, "My Name Is Red" (translated from the Turkish by Erdag Göknar; Knopf; $25.95), a murder mystery set in sixteenth-century Istanbul, uses the art of miniature illumination, much as Mann's "Doctor Faustus" did music, to explore a nation's soul.

"My Name Is Red" weighs in, with its appended chronology, at more than four hundred big pages and belongs, in its high color and scholarly density, with other recent novels that load extensive book learning onto a detective-story plot: A. S. Byatt's "Possession" and Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose" and "Foucault's Pendulum." One worries, with such ambitious flights, whether they aren't a bit narrow-shouldered for the task—whether the rather ironically melodramatic story can carry its burden of pedantry and large import. Nineteenth-century novelists catered to a more generous, less nibbled attention span; they breathed with bigger lungs and naturally wrote long, deep, and wide. Although Pamuk demonstrates the patience and constructive ability of the nineteenth-century fabricators and their heirs Proust and Mann, his instinctive affinity lies with the relatively short-winded Calvino and Borges, philosophical artificers of boxes within boxes. Pamuk's boxes are bigger, but the toylike feeling persists, of craftsmanship exulting in its powers, of giant gadgets like those with which the Europeans used to woo Turkey's sultan with evidence of Western technology.

(...)

Pamuk's consciousness of Turkey's fate of imitation and inauthenticity (...)

In the proud fashion of Joyce finishing "Ulysses," Pamuk has dated "My Name Is Red" at the end: "1990-92, 1994-98." The novel bears traces of an interrupted composition, wherein the author had to get a fresh grip upon the many glittering threads of theory and incident. Orhan Pamuk's labor, in this otherworld of miniatures, was long, and the reader's labor at times feels long, between spells of being entranced and educated.

(...)

Translating from the Turkish, a non-Indo-European language with a grammar that puts the verb at the end of even the longest sentence, isn't a task for everybody; Erdag Göknar deserves praise for the cool, smooth English in which he has rendered Pamuk's finespun sentences, passionate art appreciations, slyly pedantic debates, eerie urban scenes (it keeps snowing, which one doesn't think of as Istanbul weather), and exhaustive inventories.

mais não vale a pena, nem ler nem pensar nisso.

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em inglês, fazendo esquecer os Updikes, ver aqui.
e como se escreve uma crítica, mesmo que americana, a do Chicago Tribune.