Updike and Vargas-Llosa on Fiction

I find that I have far greater tolerance for John Updike in nonfiction than I do in fiction.  I'm still trying to get to the bottom of that mystery; however, until I do, I'll go on enjoying the nonfiction and sharing what I find fascinating.

from "Fiction: A Dialogue"
in More Matter
John Updike

Put it this way: Fictional persons are objectifications of actual impression of life received by the author. Because they are not actual, the author is free to invade their privacy and confide to us their thoughts and sensations, however evanescent and trivial. Thus he . . . provides the reader with an image of life more close-textured and vivid than any reality-bound genre, such as history, sociology, and even autobiography can provide. Fiction is realer than real, one could say.

and contrast that with Mario Vargas-Llosa

From Making Waves
Margio Vargas-Llosa

Because it is not the story which in essence decides the truth or lies of a work of fiction, but the fact that this story is written rather the lived, that it is made of words and not concrete experiences. Facts suffer a profound change when they are transformed into words.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Angel Time--Anne Rice

Review copy received 11/04/09 From the time of its announcement, I had been looking forward to this new book by Anne Rice.  As I say in every review, I am not a die-hard Anne Rice fan.  I found Interview with a Vampire interesting and intriguing, but in hindsight, must lay much of the responsibility of the current vampire as victim and love-object obsession at its feet.  After that, I had no patience with her writing until Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. In that book I observed a kind of control and authorial voice that I had not seen in any of the books I had sampled since Interview .  So too with Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana. Perhaps because of the subject matter, perhaps for other reasons, these two books seemed to witness a level of control of language and story that the other books did not.  Gone were messy florid passages that lavished two, three, four paragraphs on the description of the lace and flounce of a jabot.  These new books were sp...
Read more

Another Queen of Night

I post this because whenever I recommend to anyone the Queen of Night, I always recommend it in the Lucia Popp rendition.  It's a matter of personal taste, but what I love about this is that it is somewhat slower than the other versions and as a result, it would seem to me somewhat more difficult to perform and sustain--those high notes in which the Queen's voice becomes the Magic Flute itself are rounded, full, and deep while remaining light and airy. I have read some rather severe criticism of this ritardando; and while it may or may not reflect Mozart's intent, it is certainly within the options for staging.  It creates a real vocal showpiece from what is already a magnificent example of same. It really is an amazing example of a virtuoso composition sung by a virtuoso voice.  All of which should not be taken to mean that I do not truly appreciate the version posted earlier by Diana Damrau, it's just nice to see what a difference tempo can make. I think we can take...
Read more