The Lost Suitcase: Reflections on the Literary Life Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

The Lost Suitcase: Reflections on the Literary Life Book

Nicholas Delbanco is the best kind of teacher you can find. He educates, he elucidates without ever saying he is doing so. His readers will learn more about the writing life and the creative process in this book than from any instruction manual, and they will do that without ever feeling they are being taught. The centerpiece of this captivating collection is a novella--"The Lost Suitcase"--that finds its roots in an episode from the life of Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway's wife travels by train from Paris to Switzerland to see him, bringing along a suitcase filled with his manuscripts; the suitcase is stolen. Period. From there, Delbanco allows his novelist's mind to wander and wonder. How was their relationship at the time? What was their reunion like? Was the suitcase really stolen? Was Hemingway's wife happy to come see him? Delbanco's novella creates and recreates the scenario. Delbanco explores his theme as Bach would a melody, looking at it forward and backward, inside and out, turning it around in his fingers to make sure no angle goes unexamined. His theme and variations are a stunning illustration of the creative process at work. Elsewhere in this book, Delbanco works from another tidbit of literary history, a comment the Duke of Gloucester made to Edward Gibbon in 1781. "Another damned, thick, square book!" Gloucester said to Gibbon. "Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh, Mr. Gibbon?" From this comes a tantalizing riff on why we write, who reads, how writers are viewed by society, and the nature of a writer's legacy. (About the legacy, he notes, even Gibbon, the author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, "is largely now remembered as the butt of another man's joke.") Throughout these essays, which also touch on travel, teaching, parenting daughters, and the changed role of writers in society, Delbanco returns again and again to the relationship between fiction and biography and how the two forms draw so differently from the same source. While "fiction is a web of lies that attempts to entangle a truth," he says, "autobiography may well be the reverse: data tricked out and rearranged to invent a fictive self." And while a biographer must piece together the context in which a snippet of life occurs, "the very sort of information a biographer requires," says Delbanco, "may at a given moment come to impede the novelist." Finally, though, whether one is writing fact or fiction, one can't proceed unless the imagination is engaged. And "it is seldom possible to gauge beforehand what will prove a fruitful topic or which anecdote will fire the imagination," muses Delbanco. "Some matters move us, some do not. The writer gleans wind-scraps; he listens whenever he can." --Jane SteinbergRead More

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  • Product Description

    "We work, each one of us, in the deep dark with no notion of what lasts." With this phrase Nicholas Delbanco reveals one of his urgent concerns: Why does a writer write? How much of his work will seem meaningful to others? In The Lost Suitcase Delbanco ruminates on the life of the writer and the significance of language as art. The title novella, a stunningly crafted story that is the book´s centerpiece, takes as its central conceit a famous anecdote about Ernest Hemingway´s early work: Hemingway´s first wife, Hadley, going by train from their apartment in Paris to visit him in Switzerland, brought along, at his request, a suitcase full of his work-in-progress. The suitcase was stolen, and the loss was devastating for both of them as well as for their marriage. Did it also cause irreparable damage to Hemingway´s career? Delbanco imagines this event and its main characters in numerous extremely inventive ways that make the narrative itself a comment on creativity, fiction, and a writer´s self-awareness. In the eight reflections that surround and frame the novella, Delbanco contemplates various aspects of his craft. From the pleasure of travel writing to the travails of historical fiction, from the question of artistic judgment to that question put to the author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon ("Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh, Mr. Gibbon?") -Delbanco ranges far and wide through the literary landscape. By turns descriptive and prescriptive, he explores how literary virtuosity is achieved, how the writing of fiction can be taught, and the way literature functions for writer and reader equally. He reflects on his own history, his family, the standards of judgment and progress, and the ways we remember and revise what has happened to us. "Fiction is a web of lies that attempts to entangle the truth. And autobiography may well be the reverse: data tricked up and rearranged to invent a fictive self." In both form and content, The Lost Suitcase is a tradition-steeped meditation on literary art and an original foray into the world of words.

  • 0231115423
  • 9780231115421
  • N Delbanco
  • 30 March 2000
  • Columbia University Press
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 238
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