Reader's Digest: June 8, 2024

When the novelist Ali Smith was asked to give a series of lectures about European literature, well… it’s a rare work of criticism that cannot be summarized without spoilers. I encourage you to read it without so much as a glance at the back cover: imagine yourself in the original audience, unwitting, like the audience of A Room of One’ Own—Woolf is mentioned here more than once—but with another turn of the screw.

In lieu of a summary, some sentences from the book, which is the best thing I’ve read so far this year: brilliant, funny, and sad.

I wasn’t really sure, to be honest, what form was. I asked Sandra, at work. It’s a thing you fill in, she said.

Why? Why can’t prose ‘manage’ this ‘greater verbal exactitude’? Simply because we don’t allocate to prose the lingual attention, the aura, the essentiality, that we do to poetry? Because we want the forms to be different?

A poem, “Vermeer,” by Wisława Szymborska:

So long as that woman from the Rijksmuseum 
in painted quiet and concentration…