International Journal On Multicultural Literature, Vol. 13, No. 2, July 2023

Released in print and electronic form is the latest issue (Vol. 13, No. 2, July 2023), of the International Journal On Multicultural Literature, ably edited as ever from Thodupuzha (Kerala, India)  by Professor K.V. Dominic. The journal’s general site is at: http://www.ijmljournal.com/.

This issue includes articles on Chitra Bannerjee (Narendra Singh Nathawat), ‘Epics for Ethics’ (A. Vanitha), Louise Glück (Rupsingh Bhandari) and other topics, as well as poems and short stories, the latter including ‘Compassion Rewards’ by the editor, K.V. Dominic.

It also features (pp. 74-77) my review of Salman Rushdie’s novel ‘Victory City’ – ‘Historical Fiction Meets Magic Realism‘, published on this blog on 13 March 2023 at: https://rollason.wordpress.com/2023/03/13/salman-rushdies-victory-city/

SALMAN RUSHDIE’S ‘VICTORY CITY’ –

SALMAN RUSHDIE’S ‘VICTORY CITY’ –

Two years on, Bob Dylan’s Shadow Kingdom: the disc

Updated from my review of the original video concert, published on this blog on 18 July 2021

2 June 2023 saw the addition to the official Bob Dylan canon of the audio component of the video film streamed on 18 July 2021 and recorded in Santa Monica, California with Israeli-American Alma Har’el as director. under the title Shadow Kingdom – The Early Bob Dylan. It now appears as an audio CD (there is also a vinyl issue) under Sony’s Columbia Legacy imprint. The full video was also made commercially available as of 6 June 2023, but this review will concentrate on the CD. To avoid entanglements over genre, the original Dylan performance, as replicated on the audio disc, will be referred to as ‘the concert’.

Nothing in the Dylan world stays exactly the same, and before anything else it is worth affirming that for the maestro’s followers their reaction to this CD release cannot be identical in all respects to their response to this music first time round. Two years have come and gone, the COVID panorama of the original concert has receded, and Bob Dylan is touring again! Shadow Kingdom now looks like a precursor to what we now know as the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour, featuring five songs that would reappear on the future tour’s base setlist – including lyric variations, one song (‘To Be Alone With You’) being almost totally rewritten. Shadow Kingdom thus appears retrospectively as a testing-ground for a putative tour.

The CD is somewhat minimalist in its packaging, offering only a track list and some black-and-white stills from the video – no booklet, no sleevenotes. The subtitle The Early Bob Dylan has gone – we may say for the best, as it was something of a misnomer, considering that the originals’ date range is 1965 to 1989 whereas ‘early Dylan’ would surely suggest the acoustic/protest material of the first three albums (not represented here: there is nothing older than Bringing It All Back Home). Reduced to Shadow Kingdom, the set’s title remains enigmatic – a characteristic shared with other recent Dylan titles (think of Fallen Angels, Fragments or The Philosophy of Modern Song, or, indeed, Shadows in the Night). The shadow image may suggest the American Gothic of Edgar Allan Poe, whose poems ‘The Raven’ and ‘Eldorado’ memorably use it as motif (indeed Poe wrote a story entitled ‘Shadow’). The title also points back to the shadow imagery in a number of Dylan songs, including ‘Jokerman’ (‘It’s a shadowy world’), ‘Not Dark Yet’ (‘shadows are falling’) and ‘Forgetful Heart’ (‘like a walking shadow on my brain’).

Dylan’s performance consists of thirteen songs and one instrumental, recorded with a five-piece band. The instrumentation includes acoustic and electric guitar, bass, accordion and mandolin: Dylan plays guitar or harmonica on some of the songs (no piano). All thirteen songs are Dylan originals (no cover versions, Sinatra or otherwise!). The instrumental, ‘Sierra’s Theme’, is new to the Dylan canon and is not attributed. The back cover proclaims ‘All songs written by Bob Dylan’, but strictly speaking an instrumental is not a song, and  meanwhile the small print gives the track a copyright notice that differs from that for the others, suggesting it may not be a Dylan original: its status is thus, for now, unclear, but its enjoyability, as a lively Ry Cooder-style guitar and accordion piece, is not.

Musically the concert is excellent, occupying a terrain somewhere between the worlds of country and electric blues. Above all, Dylan’s singing is remarkably good. No blurred vocals this time round: every one of those words rang true, with the clearest of enunciation and the sensation of a Bob Dylan no longer tired of his creations and revelling in the power of his own wordcraft.

This review will look at the thirteen songs played from the viewpoint of two different kinds of sequencing that mark Dylan concerts – first, the order of the songs played as reflected in the setlist, and second, the historical chronology of the originals of those same songs. We should add that the following songs – five in all – would later be featured in the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour: ‘When I Paint My Masterpiece’; ‘Most Likely You’ll Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine)’ (promoted to oldest song on the setlist); ‘I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight’; the rewritten ‘To Be Alone With You’; and (promoted to opener) ‘Watching the River Flow’.

** 

The Shadow Kingdom concert opens with ‘When I Paint My Masterpiece’ – the only song repeated from Dylan’s last pre-pandemic live performance (in Washington, DC on 8 December 2019): for the rest, we were regaled with a totally refreshed setlist. ‘Masterpiece’ is given a country-rock treatment and features some rewriting of the lyrics, the most arresting change being that the lions now have a ‘mean and hungry look’, which is interestingly close to Cassius’s ‘lean and hungry look’ in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Dylan’s clear enunciation already impresses.

Next up is ‘Most Likely You’ll Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine)’, in an arrangement with accordion resulting in a countrification of the Blonde and Blonde original. ‘Queen Jane Approximately’ follows, slower and more reflective than the original on Highway 61 Revisited. ‘I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight’ is done fast and a shade raucously. The Highway 61 album is then again raided for ‘Tombstone Blues’ (on a song that he has been known to cut rather radically, Dylan sings five of the six stanzas, omitting only the fourth) and ‘Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues’ (done complete), in both of which he caresses the words almost conversationally.

‘To Be Alone With You’ has been subjected to a ruthless rewrite, with little but tune and title phrase remaining from the Nashville Skyline original. The new lyrics appear as if from the mouth of a later-Dylan narrator from Time Out Of Mind or Modern Times: ‘Did I kill somebody? / Did I escape the law?’, ‘I’ll hound you in death / That’s what I’ll do’. The result is an all but completely new song.

A strong contrast follows with ‘What Was It You Wanted?’, performed with a keen sensitivity (all seven verses complete) in a rendition close to the original with eloquent harmonica: this song, from 1989 and Oh Mercy, will prove to be the show’s most ‘recent’ number (it also throws up an interesting lyric connection with our title when it evokes ‘someone there in the shadows’). Next comes a heartfelt ‘Forever Young’, anthemic as always, followed by ‘Pledging My Time’ – not the profoundest song on Blonde and Blonde but certainly a surprise – whose classic blues sound, again, does not diverge far from the original.

The surprise factor continues with a moving rendition of ‘The Wicked Messenger’, probably this concert’s darkest song – and arguably its highlight. Against an arrangement denser than on John Wesley Harding, Dylan’s vocal is word perfect, with a dramatic elongation of ‘burning’ at the end of stanza two.

Next comes a rollicking ‘Watching the River Flow’, with some lyric changes but an atmosphere close to the original. Then Dylan returns to slow mode with an eloquent rendering of ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’ – a suitably valedictory song for the concert’s last vocal performance. The instrumental ‘Sierra’s Theme’ follows, and then indeed, it’s all over.

There remains to be considered the second sequencing, namely the order of composition of the originals. The earliest song, ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’, dates from Bringing It All Back Home in 1965, the latest, ‘What Was It You Wanted?’, from 1989: no doubt confounding some fans’ expectations, there is nothing ‘new’, nothing from Rough and Rowdy Ways. As we have seen, at the other end there is nothing from the ‘folk period’. Overwhelmingly, the songs chosen date from between 1965 and 1971: that is the case for eleven of them (if we include the rewritten ‘To Be Alone With You’), leaving but two hailing from later than 1971.

Dylan has not on the whole chosen the most obvious songs from his back catalogue – there is no ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, no ‘Mr Tambourine Man’: the mostly later-60s material is aimed more at connoisseurs than the general public. Be that as it may, the excellent performances that characterise Shadow Kingdom find a very much in-form Dylan magisterially sharing his past with an audience whose fidelity over the years has proved justified. We may speculate that the shadow kingdom of the title could be the realm of Bob Dylan’s past work, the products of his own creativity perceived as dark and disturbing, but also more than apt for difficult times.

Setlist (*also featured in the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour)

*’When I Paint My Masterpiece’ (More Bob Dylan Greatest Hits, 1971)  

*’Most Likely You’ll Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine’ (Blonde on Blonde, 1966)

‘Queen Jane Approximately’ (Highway 61 Revisited, 1965)

*’I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight’ (John Wesley Harding, 1968)

‘Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues’ (Highway 61 Revisited, 1965)

‘Tombstone Blues’ (Highway 61 Revisited, 1965)

*’To Be Alone With You’ (Nashville Skyline, 1969 – rewritten)

‘What Was It You Wanted?’ (Oh Mercy, 1989)

‘Forever Young’ (Planet Waves, 1974)

‘Pledging My Time’ (Blonde on Blonde, 1966)

‘The Wicked Messenger’ (John Wesley Harding, 1968)

*’Watching the River Flow’ (More Bob Dylan Greatest Hits, 1971)

‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’ (Bringing It All Back Home, 1965)

‘Sierra’s Theme’(instrumental; debut recording)

Note added 13 September 2023: This review received publication in print form in The Bridge (Gateshead, UK), No 76, Summer 2023, pp. 17-23

16th Flamenco Festival / 16° Festival del Flamenco, Esch-sur-Alzette

Once again, May of 2023 was flamenco month in Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg’s second city. Esch’s excellent Flamenco Festival is now in its 16th edition, and never fails to bring with it from Spain all the excitement of a genre that fuses music, song and dance as it expresses the passion of the Andalusian and Spanish soul.

At the concert held on 26 May in the framework of the festival at Esch’s Kulturfabrik venue, under the name TARAB (in Arabic, a trance brought on by music), the featured artists were guitarist David Caro (excellent both as soloist and as part of the ensemble), cantaor/vocalist Miguel Lavi, percussionist Roberto Jaén, and bailaora/dancer Cristina Aguilera (from Córdoba and no relation to the US artist of almost the same name!). The performance merited a full house and a diverse public lacked no warmth in its appreciation. The Flamenco Festival is by now an established part of the cultural landscape of Esch, and all gratitude is due, as always, to the organisers of so enjoyable an event!

More at/más en: https://kulturfabrik.lu/news/flamencofestival-esch-2023

Una vez más, en 2023 mayo fue el mes del flamenco en Esch-sur-Alzette, segunda ciudad del Gran Ducado de Luxemburgo. El Festival del Flamenco está ya en su 16° edición, y nunca deja de llevar con él desde España toda la animación de un género que fusiona música, canción y baile mientras da expresión a la pasión del alma andaluza y española.

En el espectáculo que tuvo lugar el 26 de mayo en el marco del festival, en el centro cultural Kulturfabrik en Esch y bajo el título TARAB (en árabe, un tipo de éxtasis inducido por la música), los artistas participantes fueron el guitarrista David Caro (excelente tanto de solista como de elemento del conjunto), el cantaor Miguel Lavi, el percusionista Roberto Jaén, y la bailaora  Cristina Aguilera (de Córdoba,  y ¡no pariente de la cantante estadounidense de casi el mismo nombre!). Como el evento merecía, las entradas se habían agotado, y un público diverso acogió a los artistas con toda calidez. El Festival del Flamenco es ya parte integral del paisaje cultural de Esch, y ¡todo el agradecimiento se debe, como siempre, a los organizadores de tan excepcional manifestacion!

FROM TOKYO: THE TRUCKIN’ BOB DYLAN

There is a lot happening  in this year of 2023 on the Bob Dylan front. Two bulky tomes are promised for later this year, one on the maestro’s non-musical artistic work and another sampling the Dylan archive in Tulsa. In addition, the music from Dylan’s much-praised film performance from 2021, Shadow Kingdom, will be put on general release in various formats in June.

As if all this did not suffice, on 12 April in the second Tokyo show of his current Japanese tour, Dylan broke the mould of his Rough and Rowdy Ways (RARW) setlist, to replace the cover of ‘That Old Black Magic’ with another, very different one – none other than the Grateful Dead classic ‘Truckin’’, first released in 1970 on their album American Beauty!

Dylan has covered a number of Grateful Dead songs in the past (including ‘Friend of the Devil’, also from ‘American Beauty’ on the RARW tour), but this one is a first. It is particularly interesting as this song has a chapter devoted to it in Dylan’s recent book The Philosophy of Modern Song. Will we be regaled with more unexpected performances of material featured in that book ? If the positive reception of that volume stimulates Bob Dylan’s creativity and diversifies the concerts, that surely can only be good news for his followers!

Note added 15 April 2023:

At the next (third) Tokyo show on 14 April, Dylan premiered, believe it or not, another Grateful Dead number (and from ‘American Beauty’ to boot), the reflective ‘Brokedown Palace’.

SALMAN RUSHDIE’S ‘VICTORY CITY’ –

HISTORICAL FICTION MEETS MAGIC REALISM

Salman Rushdie, Victory City: A Novel, New York: Random House, 2023, 352 pp., ISBN 978-0593243398

**

Victory City, Salman Rushdie’s fifteenth novel, is a challenging book to review. Its title might suggest triumph to the uninitiated, but is actually a translation of Vijayanagar, the historic South Indian city and empire which flourished from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries of the common era and constitutes the inspiration for Rushdie’s novel. The book has been generally well received, but it is difficult, if not impossible, to dissociate it (even should it not be explicitly mentioned) from the appalling circumstance of the attack on the author’s life in New York state on 12 August 2022, which left Rushdie with life-changing injuries including the loss of an eye, a kidney and the use of a hand, and made Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa a near-reality thirty-three years on. The novel was finished and with the publishers well before the attack (it was published in February 2023), but the fact that it happened will inevitably colour reviewers’ and readers’ interpretations. The present review will not attempt to establish how far the fictional events of the novel (in which cruelty is not lacking) might anticipate what happened to its author. Instead, it will concentrate on two significant dimensions of Rushdie’s narration, namely genre and gender.  

Generically, Rushdie is famed as a key exponent of magic realism in its Indian manifestation, with Midnight’s Children viewed as the canonic example. Magic realist elements are present in most of his other novels, though some use it more sparingly than others (there is little in Shalimar the Clown and none at all in The Golden House). In some cases we find a fusion of magic realism with other genres – science fiction in Quichotte or The Ground Beneath Her Feet, and, notably, historical fiction in The Enchantress of Florence, a work rather more superficial than the new novel but nonetheless its forbear (both include scholarly bibliographies, in apparent vindication of their historicity).

In Victory City, Rushdie takes the basic historical fact of Vijayanagar (which he renames as Bisnaga on a cue from Portuguese), and traces city and empire’s rise and fall with a major infusion of magic realism. At the same time he employs the conventions of the historical novel, as established some two centuries ago by Walter Scott, mingling real and imaginary characters and events. We may note that if Scott’s more successful historical novels tend to be those set in his native Scotland, Victory City is one of the most India-centred of Rushdie’s fictions: after a detour in the US with his two previous novels, Rushdie now returns with a vengeance to Indian themes, more intensively, it might be said, than in any novel since Midnight’s Children. Unity of place is largely observed as the narration scarcely ventures outside South India: there are Chinese and Italian characters and a succession of Portuguese travellers loosely based on real traders, but the main characters are Indian through and through.

Regarding characters, a figure such as the empire’s longest-serving monarch, the unpleasant but powerful Krishnadevaraya, is based on a real historical personage, and historians of South India will no doubt have their word to say about where Rushdie follows the history and where, conversely, he invents. However, the book’s undoubted protagonist, the several times queen Pampa Kampana, is entirely invented. Pampa Kampana is at the heart of the book’s magical elements: she is granted special powers by the goddess Parvati, and thus lives for 247 years, can transform into a bird, and creates the city ex nihilo from magic seeds. The book’s magic realism is thus of a strong sort, inducting the reader ‘into the very heart of the fabulous’ (180). Rushdie also makes Pampa Kampana the ultimate author of the text, forefronting her imaginary epic the Jayaparajaya (or Victory and Defeat), presented as ‘her book, the book of which this book is but a pale shadow’ (250), a worthy companion to the Ramayana and Mahabharata,and offering his text as either a summary of her narration or as verbatim ‘quotation’ (in both cases of course ‘translated’ into English). Rushdie thus uses the strategy of an imagined authoritative text and its translation to endow his work with literary credibility, incidentally inviting comparison with Cervantes’ similar sleight-of-hand in the Quijote. Generically then, this is a complex text that fuses two very different genres while also affirming its own textuality.

If we move from genre to gender, we find Rushdie, not for the first time, bringing to the fore the situation of women, in this case in India. Bisnaga is imagined as an urban community where women’s participation in society goes well beyond their conventional roles. Pampa Kampana, forced to watch her mother burn as a sati, vows that women will never be so oppressed again, pledging to ensure that ‘no more women ever have to walk into halls of flame, and that all women are treated better than orphans at men’s mercy in the dark’ (32) – that ‘there will be no more burning of living women on dead men’s pyres in Bisnaga’ (174). Under her suzerainty women in Bisnaga fill a multiplicity of positions, becoming poets, potters, traders, and more; the palace guard too is all-female. Pampa Kampana declares with pride: ‘We have women medicos, women accountants, women judges, and women bailiffs too’ (94), and a new equalitarian regime takes hold: ‘All over the city women were doing what, elsewhere in the country, was thought of as work unsuitable for them … There were women policing the streets, and working as scribes, and pulling teeth, and beating mridangam drums while men danced to the rhythm’ (36). Equally, a generalised more liberal sexual and behavioural regime takes hold, with Khajuraho-like statues being displayed in public – though it does not last and is followed by a backlash. Pampa Kampana herself eventually falls victim to cruel and mutilating institutional violence, but her authorial role continues to the end and her epic is preserved, to be rediscovered long after.

A historical novel will inevitably tempt readers to find analogies with the present. Here for Victory City, rather than seek parallels with contemporary figures or events, I would suggest that Rushdie, in line with the notion that Vijayanagar/Bisnaga passed through a number of ‘golden ages’, is implying a certain model of history, namely one of alternating libertarian and authoritarian currents. The first prevails for a while, then the other, then with luck a lesser version of the first: ‘the truth about these so-called golden ages is that they never last very long’ (174).. The most libertarian epoch was the first under Pampa Kampana’s aegis; once gone, it was never recovered in full, though other, briefer more liberal regimes did recur, up to the city’s final destruction. In the end history becomes a ‘brief illusion of happy victories set in a long continuum of bitter, disillusioning defeats’ (138). Such a model may not be without its relevance for our times.

Rushdie ends his novel with its protagonist’s decease while her epic poem survives, and with her last words as relayed by the narrator: ‘Words are the only victors’ (330). Here as the reader finishes the book the fate of its author inevitably looms into view, with the creative power of the word affirmed in all its redemptive force as a healing balm, for the book’s characters, its author, its readers, and ultimately for all who care to heed its call.

**

Note added 2 July 2023: This review has now been published in print form (see entry on this blog for 1 July 2023):

Review of Salman Rushdie, ‘Victory City’ – Historical Fiction Meets Magic Realism, International Journal on Multicultural Literature (Thodupuzha, India), Vol.13, No. 2 (July 2023), pp. 74-77.

SALMAN RUSHDIE’S ‘VICTORY CITY’: PUBLICATION DAY

Today, 7 February 2023, is official publication day for ‘Victory City’, at the age of 75 Salman Rushdie’s twenty-first book and sixteenth work of fiction. Reviews are out already, for the most part favourable but at the same time alarmed. Without exception, readings of a novel set in India that combines historical fiction and magic realism will inevitably be coloured (even should they consciously not mention it) by the appalling circumstance of the attack on his life in New York state on 12 August 2022, which has left him with life-changing injuries including the loss of an eye, a kidney and the use of a hand. The novel was finished and with the publishers before that attack, but the fact that it happened will now inevitably affect reviewers’ and readers’ interpretations, and meantime Rushdie will be unable to promote the book in person. Whatever the presumed perpetrator may say, that heinous act was, 33 years on, obviously in implementation – partial but intended as full – of Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa of 14 February 1989.

The eminent French critic Roland Barthes wrote in his day of the ‘death of the author’, arguing that determining the meaning of a literary text may be confided to the reader. That philosophy fostered a whole generation of textual (rather than biographical) readings of literature. Such concerns are reflected today in the debates over whether one can or cannot separate the art from the artist. In the case of Rushdie, it is, paradoxically, the intended – and all but brought about – literal death of the author that now renders virtually impossible the application to this novel of the Barthesian death of the author. In the circumstances, roman à clef readings and various forms of biographical overinterpretation may be expected. I have just received my copy of Rushdie’s book and will be reviewing it as soon as I have read it. I cannot project in advance in what will consist my reading amid so many, but while I feel this is likely to prove to be one of the best of its author’s works, I am sure that, for us all, in order to read this novel it will be impossible not to take into account not only the intended or imagined death, but also, quite literally and in its different dimensions, the life of the author.

Note: for my review, see entry for 13 March 2023 on this blog.

Two new reviews of my book ‘Read Books, Repeat Quotations: The Literary Bob Dylan’

Two new reviews of my book ‘Read Books, Repeat Quotations: The Literary Bob Dylan’

My book of 2021, ‘Read Books, Repeat Quotations: The Literary Bob Dylan’, has now attracted a total of five (all favourable) reviews, and I am pleased to share details of two new ones, both published in Spain (in English). For earlier reviews, please see my blog entry for 17 January 2022).

Review by Nadia López-Peláez Akalay, The Grove: Working Papers on English Studies

(University of Jaén, Spain), Vol 29, 2022, pp. 153-156 http://revistaselectronicas.ujaen.es/index.php/grove/article/view/7565

Review by Marita Nadal Blasco, Nexus (Spain), 2002-2, pp.73-75

Click to access nexus-2022-02-completo.pdf

Nexus is a online-only journal. The Grove exists both online and in print.  

My thanks to both reviewers !

**

Details of my book are :

Christopher Rollason, ‘Read Books, Repeat Quotations’: The Literary Bob Dylan, Gateshead (UK), Two Riders, 2021 – 221 pp., paperback, ISBN 978-1-9196390-0-0

See :

http://www.two-riders.co.uk/rollason.html

My new book – ‘Read Books, Repeat Quotations’: The Literary Bob Dylan

**

The Dylan Review Vol. 4, No. 2, with review of Greil Marcus, Folk Music

Now online is the latest issue (Vol. 4, No. 2, Fall/Winter 2022/2023) of the scholarly journal The Dylan Review: https://thedylanreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Dylan-Review-4.2-Fall-Winter-2022-23.pdf

Among the interesting and varied contributions are Jonathan Hodgers’ excellent review of Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song, Richard Thomas’s erudite classicist’s reading of Raphael Falco’s ‘No One to Meet’, Nicholas Bornholt’s reverberative dissection of ‘Blind Willie McTell’, and Robert Reginio’s full report on the 2022 Tulsa conference on ‘Dylan and the Beats’.

Also included is my own review of Greil Marcus’s latest book, ‘Folk Music: a Dylan biography in seven songs’,

https://thedylanreview.org/2023/02/01/review-of-folk-music-a-dylan-biography-in-seven-songs/ (Christopher Rollason, pp. 14-20).

The young Bob Dylan’s love letters and the Livraria Lello bookshop in Porto (Portugal)

When one thinks of Bob Dylan, Portugal is not a country that comes immediately to mind, though his song of 1975, ‘Sara’, does have the line ‘Drinking white rum in a Portugal bar’.  

Now, however, a surprising eventuality arises, as featured by the Portuguese news site Renascença on 13 January 2023: 

https://rr.sapo.pt/noticia/vida/2023/01/13/livraria-lello-revela-cartas-de-amor-de-um-bob-dylan-adolescente-e-apaixonado/315703/

Hugo Monteiro, ‘Livraria Lello revela cartas de amor de um Bob Dylan « adolescente e apaixonado »’

[‘Lello bookshop reveals love letters of Bob Dylan as « teenager in love »]

**

The city of Porto’s historic bookshop Livraria Lello has hitherto been best known outside Portugal as neighbouring on the equally historic café the Majestic, where J.K. Rowling is believed to have drafted notes over her café for the first Harry Potter book. Now comes a new international connection! Lello recently acquired at an auction a lot of 42 of Dylan’s early letters, of which three are now on public display on their premises. All three are love letters from the then Robert Allen Zimmerman’s teenage days.  –

A Dylanite surprise indeed! More (in Portuguese) at the url above …

EDGAR ALLAN POE Y EL MIEDO – NUEVO ESTUDIO PUBLICADO EN ESPAÑA / EDGAR ALLAN POE AND FEAR – NEW STUDY PUBLISHED IN SPAIN

Acaba de salir en el mercado hispanohablante un nuevo estudio en profundidad de la inagotable literatura de Edgar Allan Poe. Se trata del libro de Eusebio Llácer Lorca, El placer estético del terror: tres cuentos de Edgar Allan Poe (Valencia: Publicacions de l’Universitat de València: 2022).

El autor desvela los mecanismos literarios por los cuales Poe despierta sensaciones del miedo en el lector, a través de una lectura atenta de tres de sus relatos más conseguidos: ‘La máscara de la muerte roja’, ‘El pozo y el péndulo’ y ‘El tonel de Amontillado’.

Me complace agregar que el volumen empieza con un prólogo de mi autoría, y puedo recomendar este valioso estudio en pleno conocimiento de causa, a todos los que se interesen por la obra de Poe.

**

Now launched on the Spanish-speaking market is a new in-depth study illuminating the work of the inexhaustible Edgar Allan Poe, namely Eusebio Llácer Lorca, El placer estético del terror: tres cuentos de Edgar Allan Poe (Valencia: Publicacions de l’Universitat de València: 2022).

In this book the author explicates the literary mechanisms by which Edgar Allan Poe arouses sensations of fear in the reader, through the close reading of three of his finest tales: ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ and ‘The Cask of Amontillado’.

I am pleased to add that this volume begins with a prologue of which I am the author, and I can wholeheartedly recommend it to all interested in Poe.