Who reads Paul Auster?


Paul Auster’s fifteenth novel may leave those who haven’t read his previous fourteen feeling oddly unqualified, for Invisible ideally demands a certain kind of reader: someone literary and intellectual; someone mesmerized by puzzles and Möbius strips; someone with an interest in all things Lacanian, a soupçon of Francophilia and a receptivity to High Postmodernism. Even if you don’t have these requirements, the novel offers delicate rewards, but appreciating them needs a patient willingness to inhabit what one character terms “the land of If”, a slippery world of contingency, of endless unanswerables, of missing and, yes, invisible authors of words and deeds.

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It's all Greek to me ;-D

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Stephen Halliwell GREEK LAUGHTER A study of cultural psychology from Homer to early Christianity In the third century BC, when Roman ambassadors were negotiating with the Greek city of Tarentum, an ill-judged laugh put paid to any hope of peace. Ancient writers disagree about the exact cause of the mirth, but they agree that Greek laughter was the final straw in driving the Romans to war. One account points the finger at the bad Greek of the leading Roman ambassador, Postumius. It was so ungrammatical and strangely accented that the Tarentines could not conceal their amusement. The historian Dio Cassius, by contrast, laid the blame on the Romans’ national dress. “So far from receiving them decently”, he wrote, “the Tarentines laughed at the Roman toga among other things. It was the city garb, which we use in the Forum. And the envoys had put this on, whether to make a suitably dignified impression or out of fear – thinking that it would make the Tarentines respect them. But in fact g...
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