One of my favorite authors of fiction was Harold Brodkey. Brodkey was known, primarily for his short stories which appeared with regularity in the pages of the New Yorker during the 50's-90's. Brodkey died of AIDS in 1996. He was married at the time of his death, but he had lived much of his life as a homosexual.
His writings have been called "Proustian" for their emphasis on the precise description of things which happened in the past. Like Proust, Brodkey wrote about the past by first lifting the veil of sentimentality which lays over our memories and peering at the cold-hard reality of events and the way they shape memory and our larger sensibility about life. His work is, thus, simultaneously analytical, heartbreaking and humorous.
Anyway, last night I ran across this passage in a short story called Innocence. Brodkey is describing a woman he knew when he was a young man. I love this. It definitely fits into the spirit of TAB:
His writings have been called "Proustian" for their emphasis on the precise description of things which happened in the past. Like Proust, Brodkey wrote about the past by first lifting the veil of sentimentality which lays over our memories and peering at the cold-hard reality of events and the way they shape memory and our larger sensibility about life. His work is, thus, simultaneously analytical, heartbreaking and humorous.
Anyway, last night I ran across this passage in a short story called Innocence. Brodkey is describing a woman he knew when he was a young man. I love this. It definitely fits into the spirit of TAB:
Ora Perkins was a senior. Her looks were like a force that struck you. Truly, people on first meeting her involuntarily lifted their arms as if about to fend off the brightness of the apparition. She was a somewhat scrawny, tuliplike girl of middling height. To see her in the sunlight was to see Marxism die. I'm not the only one who said that. It was because seeing someone in actuality who had such a high immediate worth meant you had to decide whether such personal distinction had a right to exist or if she belonged to the state and ought to be shadowed in, reduced in scale, made lesser ...This months Astute Bloggers Award for fiction goes to Harold Brodkey as far as I'm concerned. What do you guys think?
2 comments:
I'm not familiar with Brodkey's work, but I like this little excerpt.
Some of his work is difficult, especially his novels, which are generally consider to be failures because they overreached.
I would recommend his book of short stories, Stories In An Almost Classical Mode.
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