John Dugdale
Everything Is Replicated
Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated (2002), in which the narrator searches for a survivor of a Nazi atrocity, was the first of a series of recent American novels that can be called ‘Passages to Russia’ – partly or wholly set in countries that formerly belonged to the USSR. Their authors can look to Vladimir Nabokov’s fiction as a model for bringing America and Russia together, but these works – boisterous satires or picaresque yarns, with earthy black comedy the norm – could hardly be more different from his elaborate artificial constructions.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Sabotage became so prevalent that bankers even created their own terms – ‘asymmetric information’, ‘lack of financial literacy’, ‘the principal-agent dilemma’ – to describe how they might turn a dime from customers’ gullibility or ignorance.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/master-criminals-of-the-universe
'Unlike much that was extracted from India, these paintings were not plunder, and those who created them were properly remunerated and often received due credit.'
@PParkerWriting on 'Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/artists-for-hire
‘"I feel", Lowell told Hardwick ... "as if I were pulled apart and thinning into mist, or rather being torn apart and still preferring that state to making a decision."'
Richard Davenport-Hines on the letters of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/yours-unfaithfully-2