He starts by identifying some of the more illustriously literary of Stevenson fans: Borges, Proust, Nabokov, Henry James, Walter Benjamin, Fernando Pessoa, Italo Calvino, Cesare Pavese, Bertolt Brecht, Hemingway, Kipling, Chesterton, Jack London, Natsumi Soseki, Javier Marias, and Roberto Bolano.
He was loved by our best literary readers, loved by the public, but sneered at by the literary establishment. An odd state of affairs.
There are far too many great writers on this list for us to brush away their Stevenson appreciation. So what’s going on here? It cannot be that Stevenson is too difficult for the literary establishment, as he’s also popular with average readers. I suspect it is more nearly the opposite problem—Stevenson is too pleasurable. Some critics wrongly equate greatness with difficulty.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment