Almost every one of the hundreds of books I’ve
read in the last few years was published in 1925, and The Polyglots was among the most fascinating.
Gerhardie is rarely read now—although republished by NYRB Classics—but at the
time, he was widely hailed as a genius: Graham Greene, Isaiah Berlin, and Evelyn
Waugh are said to have spent their college days walking around with copies of
his books; Greene said Gerhardie was “the most important new novelist to appear
in our young life.”
The Polyglots has a Rabelaisian level of goofy
mayhem and a Tristram Shandy-like wry understatement, with large ladlefuls of Kafka and Wodehouse. The blasé, amoral hero wanders from Russia’s
far east and then onto Harbin, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Cairo, and elsewhere in a
rambunctious picaresque journey peopled with eccentrics of every stripe.
As he
wrote to his publisher in 1931, when his star was already fading, “Sophistication, cynicism, and the
like, which still cling to me, I don’t know why, have not endeared me to anyone.”
But for me, his sophistication and cynicism were exhilarating.
The Polyglots is the story of an eccentric Belgian family living in the Far East in the uncertain years after World War I and the Russian Revolution. The tale is recounted by their dryly conceited young English relative, Captain Georges Hamlet Alexander Diabologh, who comes to stay with them during a military mission. Teeming with bizarre characters—depressives, obsessives, paranoiacs, hypochondriacs, and sex maniacs—Gerhardie paints a brilliantly absurd world where the comic and the tragic are profoundly and irrevocably entwined.
Another
1925 gem, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, was written, Anita Loos said, because
she couldn’t get H.L. Mencken’s attention on a cross-country train trip because
he was besotted by a blonde starlet-to-be.
One of the savviest, most pointed,
and cosmopolitan takes on sex and gender from the period or from any period, really. It is, like the movie adaptation with Marilyn Monroe, pure fun and
games at one level and trenchant commentary at another, but the book is that
much smarter and more trenchant and therefore, much funnier.
Loos was one of
the most successful screenwriters of her day, and she brings those skills to
bear, but she has superb dexterity as a prose stylist and an almost uncanny
knack for comic timing.
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: The Intimate Diary of a Professional Lady (1925) is a novel by Anita Loos. Adapted from a series of stories written for Harper's Bazaar, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was an astounding success for Loos, who had mired for over a decade as a screenwriter in Hollywood and New York. An immediate bestseller, the novel earned praise from leading writers and critics of its time, and has been adapted several times for theater and film. Recognized as a defining text of the Jazz Age, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is an absolute classic dubbed "the great American novel" by Edith Wharton.…
Nobody
likes Ernest Hemingway these days, but In Our Time is one of
the great novels, not just of this remarkable year but of the twentieth
century.
Hemingway was a terrible human being, as far as I can tell, and the
majority of his work is terrible, too: I challenge anyone to read Across the
River and Into the Trees, for instance, without becoming nauseous.
It is perhaps the worst single book ever written by a prominent American author.
But this first book is brilliant, and although often seen as a collection of
short stories, it is a collage-like novel, the stories punctuated with
paragraph-long vignettes, bits of what we now call flash fiction, all of it put
together with a jeweler’s skill and precision.
It is more complex (and more
elegant) than the experimental form of his mentor Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg,
Ohio. And it was considerably more accessible (and again more
elegant) than The Making of Americans by his teacher Gertrude
Stein.
A Vintage Classics edition of the early collection of short fiction that first established Ernest Hemingway's reputation, including several of his most loved stories
Ernest Hemingway, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954, did more to change the style of fiction in English than any other writer of his time with his economical prose and terse, declarative sentences that conceal more than they reveal. In Our Time, published in 1925, was the collection that first drew the world's attention to Hemingway. Besides revealing his versatility as a writer and throwing fascinating light on the themes of his major…
For years, when traveling, I found myself getting in conversations with people when I took their pictures and started to consult with them―showing them the digital shot, then retaking it until we had one they were happy with. It gave us a reason to interact, even when we shared no language in common.
These portraits result from those extended sessions, those moments of accidental intimacy on the road. Readers of my three travel books may recognize some of the people because a number of them feature in those stories.
But each stands on its own―each a testament to the human ability to connect across the fault lines that keep us precariously divided. And each is a tribute to the accidental intimacy of the road.
