The Elegant Variation

R.I.P. ROBERT FAGLES

We're deeply saddened to learn that Robert Fagles has died.

Fagles, the Arthur Marks '19 Professor of Comparative Literature Emeritus at Princeton University, was widely acclaimed for his popular translations of Homer's "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey," both of which became best-sellers. He also created English renditions of "The Oresteia" by Aeschylus and "The Three Theban Plays" by Sophocles as well as "The Aeneid" by the Roman poet Virgil.

Here is the transcript of a 1997 interview in which he discusses his translation of The Odyssey.

MINGHELLA DIES

Anthony Minghella, whose films included the superb adaptation of The English Patient, has died at a far too young 54.

SAD NEWS

A reader with firsthand knowledge writes in to advise us:

"An important person in mine and many other writers' lives, Raymond Smith, editor of Ontario Review Press and husband of Joyce Carol Oates, died yesterday at one AM in the hospital in Princeton. Ray helped many young writers by publishing them in the Review, which rumor has it will now fold after the spring issue. Ray had gone in with a lung infection but was ultimately taken by a secondary infection. Haven't seen any obits yet."

You can find the ORP here.

ROBBE-GRILLET DIES

The father of the nouveau roman has died at 81.

He was the most prominent of France's "new novelists," a group that emerged in the mid-1950s and whose experimental works tossed aside traditional literary conventions like plot and character development, narrative and chronology, chapters and punctuation. Others included Claude Simon, Michel Butor and Nathalie Sarraute.

Robbe-Grillet was inducted into France's Legion of Honour, and was one of the 40 so-called "immortals" of the prestigious Academie Francaise, the anointed protector of the French language.

You can read more in this 2003 interview with Bookforum. You can also consult his Books and Writers page, as well as some resources from The Modern Word.

"CERTAINLY OUR BEST FEMALE WRITER"

We are, we confess, unfamiliar with the novels of Theodora Keogh, but this obituary in the Telegraph has left us curious to remedy that shortcoming, Rorem's hyperbole notwithstanding. (Thanks to Robert Nedelkoff.)

The remarkable early novels treated young girls facing sexual conflict in New York and Paris, and critics could not decide whether Theodora Keogh possessed extraordinary understanding of these matters or was merely aiming to shock.

The composer and diarist Ned Rorem described her as "our best American writer, certainly our best female writer", and judged that the Keoghs "represented all that was good about America to everyone in Paris".

OBIT: GEORGE MACDONALD FRASER

George MacDonald Fraser, author of the deeply politically incorrect but hilarious Flashman series (and the slightly less well-known but equally funny The Pyrates), has died.

Launched in 1969, the books reimagined the later life of the bully in Thomas Hughes' Victorian classic Tom Brown's Schooldays. Purportedly based on packages of "rediscovered" documents, the novels depict a vain and cowardly rogue who fights, drinks and womanises his way around the British empire. Despite his less than heroic behaviour, Flashman emerges from each adventure covered in glory.

You can read an excerpt from Flashman on the March here.

R.I.P. ELIZABETH HARDWICK

We join many others who have already noted with sadness the passing of the legendary Elizabeth Hardwick.

She wrote on every subject from Bloomsbury to Marina Oswald to Mick Jagger at Altamont, from her dislike of Boston in the buttoned-up 1950s to Svetlana Alliluyeva, Stalin’s daughter, to the murderous Menendez brothers, to what she deplored as the decline of book reviewing.

Her skepticism reached a zenith when she helped to do something about that decline — when from the intellectual loftiness of her book-laden West 67th Street duplex apartment, she helped found The New York Review of Books.

A generous excerpt from her landmark 1959 Harpers essay, "The Decline of Book Reviewing," appears after the jump.

MAGDA SZABO DIES

Publishers Lunch alerts us to the passing of Magda Szabo.

Szabo won Hungary's top literary award, the Kossuth Prize, in 1978. She died while reading at home in the eastern city of Debrecen where she was born, MTI said.

Szabo's works have been translated into German, French, English and many other languages. She was banned from publishing from 1949 under Hungary's communist dictator Matyas Rakosi and dismissed from her post in the education ministry.

The Door is Szabo's best known English work, reviewed here in the Guardian and here at Hungarian Literature Online.

TO THINE OWN SELF

Hitch on Mailer:

But I remember admiring Mailer's audacity even as I slightly whistled at his promiscuity, and I suppose that no appreciation of the man is really possible without taking a comparative survey of both those capacities. I find I have to add that it's quite surprisingly difficult to picture the cultural scene without him.

NORMAN MAILER DIES

It's a terrible cliché to say an era has ended but, truly, it has.

Mr. Mailer belonged to the old literary school that regarded novel writing as a heroic enterprise undertaken by heroic characters with egos to match. He was the most transparently ambitious writer of his era, seeing himself in competition not just with his contemporaries but with the likes of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.

Kakutani offers an appraisal:

In his best work Mr. Mailer made America his subject, and in tackling everything from politics to boxing to Hollywood, from astronauts to actresses to art, he depicted — or tried to depict — the country’s contradictions: its moralistic prudery and grasping fascination with celebrity and sex and power; the outsize, outlaw past of its frontier and its current descent into “corporation land,” filled with cheap, consumer blandishments and the siren call of fame.

The deserved tributes are sure to pour in over the days and weeks ahead but for now, you can check out:

* His Books and Writers page.
* PBS's American Masters.
* An extended edition of one of his last interviews with EW.
* Mailer's IMDB Page.  (We remember, we confess, nearly walking out of Tough Guys Don't Dance.)
* John Freeman remembers Mailer at Critical Mass.
* An analysis of  his 1957 essay "The White Negro."
* "Driving Mr. Mailer"
* Mailer's 1964 Paris Review interview.
* The archive of Mailer's many contributions to the New York Review of Books.
* Excerpts from The Spooky Art, Why Are We at War? and The Castle in the Forest.
* The Mailer Society's The Mailer Review.
* Remembrances from David Ulin and the superb Louis Menand.

There are a lot of young overeducated upstarts and pretenders these days who fancy themselves entitled to be latter-day Mailers.  They haven't an ounce of the real thing.  He will not be so readily replaced,