blp
10-17-2005, 06:18 AM
Anyone got any views? She's just got a new book out. The NY Review of Books says, 'I cannot imagine life without this book'. She's widely seen as one of the great prose stylists alive, but in the current book she admits, 'I never learned the rules of grammar'. The NY Review of Books reviewer wonders why her sentences are so much better than his. It's a question I'm asking myself all the time while reading her. It might be that a lot of the time, she's actually writing poetry. The opening of her book of essays, 'The White Album' is astonishingly fragmentary and imagistic. Part of it may just be that she's rarely abstract, but at the same time never takes pains to make it clear what she's being concrete about.