Readings: The Notion of Place

Some readings from an art & humanities perspective, gathered around the notion of place. All have been inspiring to me (over many years).

Isaac Babel, The Red Cavalry. Babel's stories--vivid, concise descriptions of the Western Ukraine during the Russian Civil War--stirring and heartbreaking, often at the same moment.

Edmund Keeley, Cavafy's Alexandria. The poems of C.P. Cavafy, understood against the city that was their locus. (You'll need the poems, separately, as well.) The structure of the argument in Keeley's book is important--his treatment of history and metaphor.

Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One. Essays by the revered Russian poet of the Soviet post-war era. Read "A Room and a Half"--Brodsky's tribute to his parents--and an unforgettable description of their gray Leningrad apartment.

Czeslaw Milosz, Native Realm. You might start instead with Milosz's Native Realm--which he calls "an intellectual autobiography." Then, The Land of Ulro. The title comes from Blake--but the book itself presents Milosz's essays on a counter-Enlightenment tradition.

Franz Kafka, Diaries 1910-1913. Prague. Kafka's observations of daily life, as it intersects with the life of the imagination. The writing is unique.

Walter Benjamin, A Berlin Childhood, also his Moscow Diary, and the writings on Paris . Place, memory and the physical world--intertwined and re-imagined. Benjamin at his best.

W.S. Sebald, Austerlitz. A master novel in which architecture and place are made absolutely compelling. This is a book about place and innerness--and the impossible consequences of memory (or the impossible memory of consequences).
The photo above comes from this book--an example of how Sebald mixes photographs and text--always at their most evocative.

James Joyce, Dubliners. Joyce's first stories, maybe still his best. Unique piecing together of a city through fragments of the imagination. The Dead, Evangeline, Ivy Day in the Committee Room...

Willa Cather, My Antonia. The American mid-west--Nebraska in the 1860s. One of the best novels we have about the emotional consequences of how we deal with physical space--from boundless prairie to gridded plain.

Henry Roth, Call It Sleep. Immigrant New York. Impressionistic but vivid. This was a cult favorite for many years, until Roth was rediscovered (and then some).

William Faulkner, Absalom Absalom (well of course...)