'Harold Bloom is the leading critic of our time. He lives his literary criticism, enacts it in his soul.' James Wood, Guardian Praise for HOW TO READ AND WHY: 'HOW TO READ AND WHY is sensationally alert to the joys of reading; and practically every page has some useful insight, some energising challenge.' INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY 'It would be possible to fill a review of Bloom's work with his own phrases, so prodigal is he of insight...he is never less than memorable.' THE TIMES 'Bloom is the kind of infuriating, eccentric and ultimately inspiring teacher we all need. If you want a survey course of the best reading around start here.' SUNDAY HERALD
Scorned by some modernists, Harold Bloom is the greatest living literary critic in the tradition of Arthur Quiller-Couch - a celebrant of great writing, who believes that 'appreciation is a better mode for the understanding of achievement than are all the analytical kinds of accounting for the emergence of exceptional individuals.' His latest, enormous book is an attempt to discover the nature of genius as shown in the art of literature - to speculate on how 'the god within' speaks to an author and how his message is translated for readers. He deals with 100 writers in ten sets of ten, the sets then divided into subsets of five, in a pattern inspired by the Kabbalistic Sefirot. At first glance the groups seem almost random - but Bloom has nothing to do with the haphazard, and his choices are carefully made and invariably revealing. Shakespeare, for instance, is grouped with Cervantes, the 'first novelist', Montaigne, the first essayist, Milton, the reinventor of epic poetry, and Tolstoy, who fused epic and novel. Then come 'the great autobiographers of the self', Lucretius and Virgil, St Augustine, Dante and Chaucer. The essays are short but inspiring, and among other things will prompt the reader to turn to the less familiar writers included - de Quieroz, Alejo Carpentier, Fernando Pessoa and others for whose genius Bloom makes a compelling case in support of his argument that literary genius is vital, and more so now than ever before - that 'to be augmented by the genius of others is to enhance the possibilities of survival'. (Kirkus UK)
A fresh installment in Bloom's Adleresque campaign to dust off the Western Civ 101 syllabus for a generation of readers led astray by the "impostors" running the academy. "Genius," Bloom (How to Read and Why, 2000, etc.) allows, is a slippery term: it is "a mystery of the capacious consciousness"; it is "idiosyncratic and grandly arbitrary, and ultimately stands alone"; it is revealed in, well, works of genius of the sort that the contemporary university seems to have little room for-in, say, the poems of Eliot, the dramas of Shakespeare, the sermons of Donne. Never mind the apparent circularity of the argument, for here Bloom collects deeply learned remarks, critical and biographical, on a cluster of a hundred shapers and makers of the Western mind as, he suggests, it ought to be. Only a few of them are non-Western: the sole representative of Asia is Lady Murasaki, author of the medieval Tale of Genji; Muhammad represents the Arab world; Africa goes entirely unrepresented. But Bloom is inclusive, at least in his own way; grouping his hundred authors by a complex-and certainly idiosyncratic-classificatory system of perceived affinities, one that derives from the Kabbalah and certain Gnostic texts, he finds room for moderns such as Tennessee Williams and Wallace Stevens, for Hispanic writers such as Octavio Paz and Alejo Carpentier, for women such as Christina Rossetti and Flannery O'Connor alongside the usual dead white males of the European canon. Bloom's system will likely be more meaningful to Bloom than his readers, but it's refreshing all the same to see Herman Melville cast alongside Virginia Woolf, Robert Browning alongside Lewis Carroll, Homer alongside James Joyce by virtue of their writerly interests. Bloom's biographical sketches are satisfyingly offbeat, if sometimes so allusive as to assume wide background reading: "The sage of Vienna, who intended to become no less than a new Moses, replacing Judaism by psychoanalysis, became instead a new Prospero, but one who would not break his staff or drown his book." Still, readers suitably prepared for Bloom, and of a hell-in-a-handbasket cast of mind with respect to the current culture, will find this a rewarding excursion. (Kirkus Reviews)
