Wednesday, February 12, 2003

It is almost as satisying to delete web log entries as it is to write them.  I am reading Richard Powers' most recent novel, The Time of Our Singing. Reviewers frequently criticize Powers for an inability to create empathetic characters, but I don't find that to be true.  I understand that this may be due to the fact that I share certain qualities with many of Richard Powers' characters.  Also, what will probably be the last book by W.G. Sebald was published recently - a nonfiction work entitled On The Natural History of Destruction, consisting of essays in which he delineates German literature's reluctance or refusal to address the ramifications of the Allied carpet bombing during the second World War.  I have ordered, but not yet received my copy.  There is an excellent essay on this book as it relates to the work of Thomas Bernhard (another of my favorites).  Sebald's own fictional works seem to alternately embrace and reject silence as an appropriate response to the unthinkable, certainly the strange allure of his work has much to do with the sense of writing as a desperate act against terminal lapse into some horrible darkness - a void into which words must be poured, endlessly. 9:27:58 PM