I downloaded The Last Gentleman on iBooks having confused it in memory with Walker Percy’s sequel, The Second Coming. I read both thirty years in reverse order before soon after I married but forgot that detail. It took about 250 pages for me to realize my mistake. I remember being fond of both, ...
This is the book that almost broke my book club. John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces is as famous for its back-story as it is for its content. It was published posthumously in 1980, over a decade after Toole ended his own life by carbon monoxide poisoning. Despite having been earlier rej...
Binx Bolling, è colpa mia o è colpa del tuo autore?Io sono una di quelle a cui basta poco per essere convinta della scelta. E in questo caso il pacchetto era piuttosto invitante: un titolo accattivante e con rimandi alla mia persona talmente evidenti che non li potevo ignorare, un'offerta pratica...
I understand, I think, the adoration some readers have for Walker Percy's Lost In The Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book. But while I might garner an aloof admiration for Percy's project, I can't generate much love for it. This is partially because Percy worked hard to keep the book “cool” (in the...
Dr. Thomas More is not made of the same material as his famous ancestor, St. Thomas More (“A Man for All Seasons”), martyr to Henry VIII and the author of “Utopia.” The modern Dr. More has never met a cause for which he would suffer inconvenience let alone death. Indeed, Dr. More suffers from al...
I’ve read most of Percy’s other books—my favorites being Love in the Ruins and The Moviegoer (with a special fondness for his venture into semiotics and philosophy, Message in the Bottle)—but all this took place more than 25 years ago, and my recollections are hazy. The later novels (Second Comi...
Prior to stumbling on this book, I'd known Percy mainly as the Southern Literary Lion who discovered John Kennedy Toole, author of A Confederacy of Dunces, which I adore. Percy's lively introduction to Dunces tells the sad story of Toole, who committed suicide and left behind his unpublished mast...
Sit down. You still won’t? I have a confession to make. I was not quite honest yesterday when I pretended not to know you. I knew you perfectly well. There’s nothing wrong with my memory. It’s just that I don’t like to remember. Why shouldn’t I remember you? We were best of friends, in fact insep...