![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
New work by an old friend for a late and tired night. My household has had the frustrating experience of trying to find Diderot's grave in St.-Roch; they lost him during the Revolution, it turns out, when the whole floor was dug up and commingled into one large pit. And the rector didn't know who he was.
He was, of course, the man who introduced lesbian porn to European philosophy (no, really, it's right there in The Nun) and a writer with something of Voltaire's blaze and something of Sterne's tricks. His most direct literary descendant is Italo Calvino, and I defy anyone not to find Jacques the Fatalist and his Master an incredibly frustrating experience (but good, I suspect, for the character).
Oh, I don't know, I can't talk about Diderot. There's a bust of him six feet in front of me and to the right, in the nook that contains all the really old books. It is very difficult to write a review about work by someone one has a part-share in a statue of.
At any rate, this is the collection of his shorter work, his five short stories, of which three are a linked trilogy that come to slightly more than novella length. None were intended for publication. Indeed, one was intended as a practical joke the same way The Nun was, letters describing a situation that was supposed to have really happened, an amusement for a friend who lived at a fair distance. All partake in his fragmented nature, the narrative through interjections by imaginary listeners, snatches of pseudonymous speeches; one of these stories is an entire fictional appendix written for a very real and non-fictional memoir by a famous explorer. His themes are love, stupidity, public opinion, the pointlessness of sexual fidelity and the unlikeliness of God. He is funny, charming, confusing, sly, maundering, ridiculously intelligent, subtle in his depiction of character, and second to none in his ability to be in one sentence both two hundred years ahead of himself in the sheer flow of his genius and three words later blazingly, spectacularly, amazingly wrong.
Also you will find him kinder than Voltaire, a little. But with something more of grief.
The short work is probably not the place to start with Diderot-- I'd make that either Jacques the Fatalist or Rameau's Nephew. But it is very fine, if you like its genre (contes philosophiques), and will certainly give anybody a good argument, and an entertaining time spent arguing.
If I were writing a postmodernist review, or one in the style of the subject author, this is where I would have the audience interject, but I shan't, as I already know what the listener ought to be saying to me: go to bed, it's three in the morning. Who needs to go off into rhetorical tricks for that kind of advice? I shall go to bed at once.
He was, of course, the man who introduced lesbian porn to European philosophy (no, really, it's right there in The Nun) and a writer with something of Voltaire's blaze and something of Sterne's tricks. His most direct literary descendant is Italo Calvino, and I defy anyone not to find Jacques the Fatalist and his Master an incredibly frustrating experience (but good, I suspect, for the character).
Oh, I don't know, I can't talk about Diderot. There's a bust of him six feet in front of me and to the right, in the nook that contains all the really old books. It is very difficult to write a review about work by someone one has a part-share in a statue of.
At any rate, this is the collection of his shorter work, his five short stories, of which three are a linked trilogy that come to slightly more than novella length. None were intended for publication. Indeed, one was intended as a practical joke the same way The Nun was, letters describing a situation that was supposed to have really happened, an amusement for a friend who lived at a fair distance. All partake in his fragmented nature, the narrative through interjections by imaginary listeners, snatches of pseudonymous speeches; one of these stories is an entire fictional appendix written for a very real and non-fictional memoir by a famous explorer. His themes are love, stupidity, public opinion, the pointlessness of sexual fidelity and the unlikeliness of God. He is funny, charming, confusing, sly, maundering, ridiculously intelligent, subtle in his depiction of character, and second to none in his ability to be in one sentence both two hundred years ahead of himself in the sheer flow of his genius and three words later blazingly, spectacularly, amazingly wrong.
Also you will find him kinder than Voltaire, a little. But with something more of grief.
The short work is probably not the place to start with Diderot-- I'd make that either Jacques the Fatalist or Rameau's Nephew. But it is very fine, if you like its genre (contes philosophiques), and will certainly give anybody a good argument, and an entertaining time spent arguing.
If I were writing a postmodernist review, or one in the style of the subject author, this is where I would have the audience interject, but I shan't, as I already know what the listener ought to be saying to me: go to bed, it's three in the morning. Who needs to go off into rhetorical tricks for that kind of advice? I shall go to bed at once.
