![]() Like Hamlet, she must be cruel in order to be kind. This diminishment is also a curious effect of Lapvona itself … Lapvona is the clearest indication yet that the desired effect of Moshfegh’s fiction is not shock but sympathy. In part, her characteristic incisiveness is dulled by her decision to forgo the first person, in favor of more than a dozen centers of consciousness. “ Moshfegh’s own sacraments involve a different orifice, so you will forgive her if her search has led her up her own ass … At first glance, Lapvona is the most disgusting thing Moshfegh has ever written…Yet Moshfegh’s trusty razor can feel oddly blunted in Lapvona. –Jody Rosen on Bob Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song ( The Los Angeles Times) ![]() You have to plow through 46 chapters before encountering a song by a female artist … Yet women loom large in his consciousness and are omnipresent in his pages-appearing in such monstrous form, evoked in language so marinated in misogyny, that, reading The Philosophy of Modern Song, I began to feel like a therapist, sneaking glances at my watch while the crackpot on the couch blurts one creepy fantasy after another … It’s a bummer, to put it mildly, to find a Nobel laureate…mixing metaphors and spouting nonsense like an elderly uncle who bulk-emails links to Fox News segments.” But coherence isn’t what you want from Bob Dylan … Dylan can write what journalists call a great lede: a first sentence that detonates like a hand grenade … What does all this add up to? Not quite a philosophy of modern song, or at least not a coherent one. It rip-snorts along, charging from song to song, idea to idea. ![]() It asserts that the book is an important work, a tome that merits a place on your loftiest library shelf, up in the thin air where you keep the leather-bound, gilt-edged stuff … But the title is also a wisecrack, too puffed up and self-important to be taken at face value … As a work of prose, The Philosophy of Modern Song is relentless. “ The Philosophy of Modern Song is a mouthful, a phrase that puts on airs. –Dwight Garner on Jared Kushner’s Breaking History: A White House Memoir ( The New York Times) This book is like a tour of a once majestic 18th-century wooden house, now burned to its foundations, that focuses solely on, and rejoices in, what’s left amid the ashes … Reading this book reminded me of watching a cat lick a dog’s eye goo… The tone is college admissions essay … Kushner, poignantly, repeatedly beats his own drum … A therapist might call these cries for help … The bulk of Breaking History-at nearly 500 pages, it’s a slog-goes deeply into the weeds … What a queasy-making book to have in your hands.” Kushner almost entirely ignores the chaos, the alienation of allies, the breaking of laws and norms, the flirtations with dictators, the comprehensive loss of America’s moral leadership … ![]() “It’s a title that, in its thoroughgoing lack of self-awareness, matches this book’s contents … He betrays little cognizance that he was in demand because, as a landslide of other reporting has demonstrated, he was in over his head, unable to curb his avarice, a cocky young real estate heir who happened to unwrap a lot of Big Macs beside his father-in-law … Breaking History is an earnest and soulless-Kushner looks like a mannequin, and he writes like one-and peculiarly selective appraisal of Donald J. ![]()
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