This new book, from the NYRB’s publishing arm, is in a non-fiction genre I love: short entries dedicated to an integrating purpose; approaching a subject via concentrated, separated stabs rather than extended unfolding text. In philosophy this is called the aphoristic technique. In wider literature, it can range from the concise notebook to prose poetry.
It is a genre whose masterpiece in English is Cyril Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave, but it is more often found in continental literature; and the French especially have made it their own, where its progenitor is usually said to be Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris, described as prose poems and published in 1869 after the author’s death. Baudelaire, however, is preceded by Gérard de Nerval, whose urban observations, collected in Les Nuits d’octobre (1852), are perhaps even more luminous.
It is a form which no American has pulled off. Americans have been much more effective at the diary: The Paris Diary of Ned Rorem is an enormous pleasure.
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