In the early 1990s, Iris Murdoch was writing a new novel, as she'd done 25 times before in her life. But this time something was terribly off. Her protagonist, Jackson, an English manservant who has a mysterious effect on a circle of friends, once meticulously realized in her head, had become a stranger to her. As Murdoch later told Joanna Coles, a Guardian journalist who visited her in her house in North Oxford in 1996, a year after the publication of the book, Jackson's Dilemma, she was suffering from a bad writer's block. It began with Jackson and now the shadows had suffused her life. "At the moment I'm just falling, falling … just falling as it were," Murdoch told Coles. "I think of things and then they go away forever."
Jackson's Dilemma was a flop. Some reviewers were respectful, if confused, calling it "an Indian Rope Trick, in which all the people … have no selves," and "like the work of a 13-year-old schoolgirl who doesn't get out enough." Compared to her earlier works, which showcase a rich command of vocabulary and a keen grasp of grammar, Jackson's Dilemma is rife with sentences that forge blindly ahead, lacking delicate…
Read More…
from #Ἀθηνᾶ via ola Kala on Inoreader http://ift.tt/2dc2xFw
via IFTTT
Δεν υπάρχουν σχόλια:
Δημοσίευση σχολίου