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"The role of the critic," Daniel Mendelsohn writes, "is to mediate intelligently and stylishly between a work and its audience; to educate and edify in an engaging and, preferably, entertaining way." His latest collection exemplifies the range, depth, and erudition that have made him "required reading for anyone interested in dissecting culture" (The Daily Beast). In Ecstasy and Terror, Mendelsohn once again casts an eye at literature, film, television, and the personal essay, filtering his insights through his training as a scholar of classical antiquity in illuminating and sometimes surprising ways. Many of these essays look with fresh eyes at our culture's Greek and Roman models: some find an arresting modernity in canonical works (Bacchae, the Aeneid), while others detect a "Greek DNA" in our responses to national traumas such as the Boston Marathon bombings and the assassination of JFK. There are pieces on contemporary literature, from the "aesthetics of victimhood" in Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life to the uncomfortable mixture of art and autobiography in novels by Henry Roth, Ingmar Bergman, and Karl Ove Knausgård. Mendelsohn considers pop culture, too, in essays on the feminism of Game of Thrones and on recent films about artificial intelligence--a subject, he reminds us, that was already of interest to Homer. This collection also brings together for the first time a number of the award-winning memoirist's personal essays, including his "critic's manifesto" and a touching reminiscence of his boyhood correspondence with the historical novelist Mary Renault, who inspired him to study the Classics.… (more)
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A classicist by training, Mendelsohn often manages to tie his ostensible subject (the Boston Marathon bombers, Game of Thrones, robots...) to issues and dramas plumbed back in ancient Greece or Rome, in ways that enlighten both and serve to underscore the universalities and humanity across the millennia. He is a master (and staunch defender, god love him) of the art of the negative review: even when he is critical, it is expressed with patience, serious attention, concrete examples, and careful reasoning. There is a lovely, poignant piece on his long epistolary relationship with the novelist Mary Renault, whose stories set in the ancient world lit up his attraction to the classics and his sexuality as a teenager. (Sad to say, not ONE of her books is owned by my local affluent, educated, suburban public library, so I must search farther afield.) His lengthy (necessarily...) piece on Karl Ove Knausgaard's six-volume "autofiction" oeuvre is an insightful consideration of that monument of weirdly compelling (at least some of the time) self-absorption. He concludes, pithily and brilliantly, that Knausgaard (as does Hitler in his own "Struggle") tends to focus entirely on the "I" and the "they" of his writing, leaving no room for "you"... the reader. The final piece, "A Critic's Manifesto," made me want to stand up and cheer: everything I had intuited, sought, and admired in Mendelsohn's work turns out to be exactly what he aims and strives for. Well done, sir. Please hurry up and write more. My brain is waiting for a blast of oxygen.