Literary Biography

Let us enjoy the surprises, the challenges of literature in all languages, in translation and otherwise. Let us contemplate the writer, too, writing in all her forms. Let us see how we are.

As Dorothy Parker said, and I agree, "Wildly funny, desperately sad, brutal and kind, furious and patient, there was no other like Nathanael West."

Gustave Flaubert wrestles with the ravages of old age, religion, the joy and heartbreak of love, children, and more. Though each of these stories is just some 40 pages long, they loom larger in the imagination.

Writing biography is a scandalous enterprise; its penciled craftsman is perennially suspect for being neither art-maker, nor historian, nor critic -- but some simple version of all three.

As I've been reading this new Davis translation of Madame Bovary, familiar feelings have come rushing back to me. I always hope things will turn out differently, and this translation is no exception.

I've come to believe that what makes the biography of a writer crackle and pop is knowing as many lies as truths -- the lies they told to others, the lies others told of them, and, most importantly, the lies they told themselves.