magiadoreal

Rarely do you encounter a woman who commands as much admiration as does the painter Vanessa Bell in Priya Parmar’s multilayered, subtly shaded novel, “Vanessa and Her Sister.” The sister of the title is, of course, Virginia Woolf, who understood how hard it is for a novelist to capture a character. “Few catch the phantom,” Woolf said in a lecture at Cambridge in 1924, the year before the publication of “Mrs. Dalloway.” “Most have to be content with a scrap of her dress or a wisp of her hair.” Parmar’s portrait brings Vanessa out of the shadows, into fully realized, shining visibility. The world remembers Virginia better than her enigmatic older sister: Parmar restores the symmetry of their relationship in the familial landscape, showing how essential Vanessa’s steadying force was to Virginia’s precarious balance. Though Vanessa was only two and a half years older than Virginia, she took on a maternal role for her and their two brothers in 1895, after their mother’s death, when

I grew up in West Virginia as a Catholic in a Protestant culture, the kind we would today describe as evangelical. We Catholics had the pope — but he was a distant and, to be blunt, foreign figure. Our Protestant neighbors had Billy Graham, the friend of presidents, business magnates and celebrities, who through the magic of television was a frequent, familiar guest in the homes of ordinary people; and he was as American as apple pie. We didn’t admit it in those days, but we Appalachian Catholics — like, I suspect, many of our coreligionists throughout the land — envied those Protestants. We figured that Billy Graham made being a Protestant in America something like what it was to be a Catholic in Italy. And while we weren’t quite sure it wasn’t a little bit disloyal to watch, listen to and even like and admire a Protestant preacher, watch and listen many of us did — sometimes against the warnings of our parish priests or the nuns who taught us in parochial schools. It was ha

“Scratch John Bull . . . and you find the ancient Briton who revels in blood, who loves to dip deep into a murder and devours the details of a hanging,” The Pall Mall Gazette wrote in 1887, a year before Robert Louis Stevenson’s story “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” became a stage play. People packed the theater night after night, some fainting after witnessing Richard Mansfield’s performance, which included an extraordinary onstage transformation from monster to doctor. This appetite for gore as entertainment spawned a major industry in print, theater and artifacts in 19th-century England. Lucy Worsley’s lively book, “The Art of the English Murder,” traces the growth of this industry through some of the era’s most avidly followed killings. Her goal isn’t to provide a history of crime or crime writing, but to show how “the British  enjoyed  and  consumed  the idea of murder.” The interplay of urban growth, a rapid rise in literacy, the development of a professional p

‘Lila,’ by Marilynne Robinson Regionalism has always played an important part in American literature, with, say, William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County the iconic Southern example. Those who have read Marilynne Robinson’s radiant Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “Gilead,” will remember that imaginary town in southernmost Iowa, near the conjunction of Missouri, Kansas and Nebraska — Plains country, partially Southern in spirit and looking west, thereby broadly embodying the essential rural Midwestern America at a seminal period, from the Depression to around 1950. Although American literature isn’t usually known for its religious and philosophical novels, we might think of certain essential works, particularly of Melville and Hawthorne, that concern grace and redemption. Robinson’s new novel, “Lila,” combines these regional and spiritual strains of American writing. Two families are of special interest in the town of Gilead, the Boughtons and the Ameses, each having several gener

Each week in Bookends, two writers take on questions about the world of books. Roland Barthes said, “It is no longer the sexual which is indecent, it is the sentimental.” This week, Zoë Heller and Leslie Jamison debate whether sentimentailty is a cardinal sin for writers. By Zoë Heller Sentimental fiction is a kind of pablum: Excessive amounts can spoil the appetite for reality, or at least for more fibrous forms of art. Photo Zoë Heller Credit Illustration by R. Kikuo Johnson Continue reading the main story Related Coverage Bookends: Archive SEPT. 10, 2013

‘The Monogram Murders,’ Sophie Hannah’s Poirot Mystery Nobody would dispute the fact that Hercule Poirot, the elegant Belgian detective, he of the patent-leather shoes and the waxed mustache, is dead. Agatha Christie brought him to an end in her appropriately named novel, “Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case,” and The New York Times itself marked his death with a fictional obituary. But the demise of the hero, and of the author, no longer needs to be the end of the story. The literary executors of James Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming, have held this view for some years, and there seems to be no end to the public’s enthusiasm for rewritten versions of a whole host of literary favorites. Continue reading the main story The purists, of course, shake their heads in disapproval, arguing that fictional characters are the product of a particular imagination and should not be endlessly reimagined by later generations of authors. Others, while not objecting in principle, believe writers

Elena Ferrante’s ‘Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay’ Elena Ferrante is one of the great novelists of our time. Her voice is passionate, her view sweeping and her gaze basilisk. Her subject is the domestic world, and part of her genius lies in her capacity to turn this sphere into an infernal region, full of rage and violence, unlimited in its intellectual and emotional reach. Ferrante’s view of family life is anything but sentimental, anything but comforting. In fact, her writing is remarkable for its velocity and ruthlessness. Reading her is like getting into a fast car with Tony Soprano: At once you are caught up and silenced, rendered breathless, respectful. Ferrante is the author of six novels. Her most recently translated, “Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay,” is the third in a Neapolitan series that began with “My Brilliant Friend” and “The Story of a New Name.” The books (impeccably translated by Ann Goldstein) track the lives of two women, Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo