Ran into some unexpectedly powerful sentences (and literary criticism – or is it evaluation?) while listening to a bio of Nobel-Prize winner Pearl Buck.
Buck grew up as a Presbyterian missionary’s kid in China before the Boxer Rebellion, & devoured Dickens especially, reading his entire ouevre every year for a decade:
“As a prospective writer herself, she responded avidly to the haunting power of an imagination that accesses horrors lurking deep beyond the reach of the conscious mind through symbolic imagery and drama, gluing the narrative together on the surface with the bland sentimentality that soothes and reassures readers. The split between dream-like purity and contaminated reality … would become a crucial part of the implicit bargain she too would make later with her American public.”
-Hilary Spurling, Pearl Buck in China
There’s also a lovely sentence describing the effects of famine:
“Gaunt pregnant women gnawed from within” that grabbed me by its accuracy and its horror.
No comments:
Post a Comment