하상욱: 서울 시 2

간결은 기지의 본질이라는 속담이있으므로 이책은 짧아도 기지로 가득해있다.  한국어의 많은 동음이의어, 동철이의어들의 도움을 받아 한 문장 속에 한 문단의 내용을 숨었다.  그러한 놀라운 정직성이 방패 세울 수 있기 전에 당도하여 골수에 사무치게 한다.  60% 웃기고 50% 현명하고 30% 통찰하고 30% 감정적이고 30% 그냥 설렁하며 단권에 두권의 보람이 있다.

김주영: 홍어

이 책을 불완전히 이해를 하는 것은 나의 즐거음에 장벽이 아니었다.  서양의 책을 읽는 것에 단어단어로 이해 해야 의미를 풀어 감상할 수 있다.  동양의 문학은 그렇게 읽으면 낭비다.  나무만 보고 숲을 보지 못하는 것이다.  나는 이책을 읽으면서 어떤 문장을 이해했고 어떤 다른 문장을 추측해서 해석했고, 또 다른 문장을 단어단어를 사전에 찾아보고 사투리 때문에 찾지 못 해서 포기 했다.  전체적인 소감은 쓰러져서 눈 더미에 빠진 것과 비슷하다.  눈송이들 모두다 유일무이하며 아름답지만 잠깐 추위를 느끼는 것도 알음답다.

Nashville

To the extent that the goal of art, in cinema or otherwise, is the clear and inexplicable crystallization of even the smallest moment of humanity, to exactly that extent this movie is a crowning glory.  To be sure, there are other goals of art: to tell a story, to inspire reaction, to simply exist in its beauty, and Nashville meets each of these goals almost as well.  But I can think of no other movie that captures and seals in amber exactly what it means to be a human the way this one does.  It tells no story completely, and doesn't need to.  It is unsatisfying and even ugly at times.  It means at once nothing and everything.  I am not any of the characters in this movie; I cannot relate to them at all.  I am instead the movie itself: a dizzying medley of experiences and stories that mean nothing individually, but everything in their whole.

Luigi Pirandello: The Late Mattia Pascal

What a joy and what a mercy it is to be free.  To be free from the limits of interpretation, to not ask "What does it mean?", and to experience a book as an event, rather than as a coded message of some sort, how lovely and kind.

And yet, as the title character found in his adventures here, every freedom is a tyranny of its own.  Yes, he loosed himself from the bonds of family, duty, and obligation; he escaped from the prison of his life.  But this freedom closed off to him that which he really wanted: stability, connection, and especially love.  He set about painting a new picture of himself, and, "determined to begin  new life from this point, [he] was filled and uplifted by a fresh infantile happiness" (83). Nonetheless, he found himself staring at the unfinished, unfinishable portrait of himself and growling at it, much as Pepita did later in the book (201).

Reading this book on its own terms, in perhaps something approaching an Asian style, I found myself immersed in its world, and as often happens, let the book escape from itself and read me back, even reading the other books I was working through with me.  But what did it mean?  Why did I read it?  Am I missing something, perhaps hidden in Paleari's theories of light and darkness (114-16)? Is the life that I have reconstructed to escape my former life as hopelessly untethered to reality as that of Adriano Meis?

Igor Stravinsky: An Autobiography

This is exactly what a memoir should be.  Stravinsky's approach to the recounting of his life is directly in line with his approach to music.  Of the latter, he says: "The interpreter, of necessity can think of nothing but interpretation, and thus takes on the garb of a translator . . . this is an absurdity in music" (34).  He later explains, "All these misunderstandings arise from the fact that people will always insist upon looking in music for something that is not there.  The main thing for them is to know what the piece expresses . . . They never seem to understand that music has an entity of its own apart form anything that it may suggest to them" (162). 

And it is the same objectivity that Stravinsky demands in music that he brings to narrative.  The reader of his autobiography "will not have found any lyrical outpourings or intimate confessions" (174).  Said reader will merely find a very straightforward account of his life, complete with colorful anecdotes.  What does that, or any, life mean?  One can no more answer life than one can answer music.  Both simply are, and must be appreciated and experienced on their own terms.