"Why read the classics?", asks Italo Calvino in his famous essay collection, and he gives us thirteen good reasons as well as a good many examples.
"Classics for Pleasure" by the Pulitzer Prize-decorated critic Michael Dirda gives the best answer in the title, and he goes on to prove it in 88 short
essays on various authors of world literature. The index, however, names hundreds of authors and…mehr"Why read the classics?", asks Italo Calvino in his famous essay collection, and he gives us thirteen good reasons as well as a good many examples.
"Classics for Pleasure" by the Pulitzer Prize-decorated critic Michael Dirda gives the best answer in the title, and he goes on to prove it in 88 short essays on various authors of world literature. The index, however, names hundreds of authors and titles, for Dirda is one of the most well-read people alive.
This is not the usual round-up of the usual suspects (namely, Shakespeare and Company). As Dirda says in his introduction: "It seemed more useful - and more fun - to point readers to new authors and less obvious classics." He reaches chronologically from Lao-tse and Petronius to Philipp K. Dick and Edward Gorey, geographically from Henry James and Daniel Defoe to Ivan Goncharov, Denis Diderot and E.T.A. Hoffmann, thematically from Robert Burton to Agatha Christie.
There are many long passages of citations, not only from the authors themselves but also from other eminent critics - which is all very well, but one might have wished for a more personal text from this critic universally acclaimed for his wit and style.
One more disappointment, and a bitter one: Unlike most German critics, Dirda has not been able to detect the cold-blooded inhumanity in the prose style of that aesteticising Übermensch Ernst Jünger. The German translator must have done some clever rewriting.
