The Brooklyn Rail

The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing

By Andrew Ervin

If the physical storage device for a work of art is destroyed—be it an Atari cartridge, VHS cassette, or 3.5˝ floppy diskette—what happens to the artwork itself? These days, probably not a damn thing. In this age of digital reproduction, there are likely to be more copies available a few clicks away on eBay. The aura is all but gone. Walter Benjamin is spinning vinyl in his grave.

In Conversation

Down Away from the Sun You’ll Burrow

Twenty Years After restores a chapter that Dumas once serialized in his native French but which has never before appeared in English. It also, as with the previous and future volumes, moves past the Victorian-era translations that were, per Ellsworth’s introduction, for an “audience that was uncomfortable with frank depictions of violence and sexuality.” Those old translations, he reminds us, “employed a style of elevated diction that was deemed appropriate for historical novels of the 19th century, but seems stiff, long-winded, and passive to today’s readers.” In Ellsworth’s hands, these stories of swashbuckling and all-for-one-and-one-for-all friendship feel new again. The Three Musketeers is an enormously entertaining tale for the ages.

In Conversation

BRANDON HOBSON with Andrew Ervin

I’m in awe of Hobson’s vision, his ability to guide his readers beyond the constraints of realism with grace and authority. And that’s perhaps what I love most about The Removed: the necessary reminder that the real and the extra-real are in fact the same thing; the distinctions we tend to make say more about ourselves than the world(s) in which we dwell.

Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger and Stella Maris

By Andrew Ervin

In these magnificent, conjoined novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, McCarthy has taken the oldest story in the world—humankind’s search for meaning in a world seemingly devoid of God—and makes it feel fresh and personal to each and every one of us.

Franz Kafka: The Drawings

By Andrew Ervin

To me, thinking and not-thinking are often the same thing, and that’s clearest when I have an eraser in hand. The recent landmark publication of Franz Kafka’s illustrations in The Drawings, edited by Andrea Kilcher, a professor of literature and cultural studies in Zurich, has led me to think more about the ways in which these two states of being—if they are different—benefit from each other.

In Conversation

Then I Put In My False Heart: SARAH ROSE ETTER in conversation with Andrew Ervin

By Andrew Ervin

In Sarah Rose Etter’s weird and wonderful new novel The Book of X, our protagonist Cassie is afflicted by a medical anomaly. “I was born a knot like my mother and her mother before her,” it begins. Each of the women in her family have their stomachs twisted into bulbous masses of flesh and muscle.

In Conversation

Mark Haber with Andrew Ervin

The questions of what constitutes art and who gets to decide have gnawed at me for years. Mark Haber’s second novel, Saint Sebastian’s Abyss, addresses these same concerns in ways I wish I had thought to do myself.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun

By Andrew Ervin

What makes Klara and the Sun in particular so remarkable, I think, is that instead of only looking backward at our origin stories, Ishiguro here is looking forward in time as if to warn us that the myths we insist upon believing today will shape how we will live in the future. He reminds us that even our most enduring stories can be rewritten.

Haruki Murakami’s First Person Singular

By Andrew Ervin

For all our reminiscing, Murakami seems to say, it’s the things we don’t remember that might haunt us the most. After all, memory is itself another liminal space, one where we experience both now and then at the same time. Likewise, finishing First Person Singluar requires thinking back to everything we’ve just read about these characters’ lives, and to everything we didn’t.