'The Bath Fugues is a meditation on melancholy and art, in the form of three interwoven novellas, centred respectively on an ageing art forger; a Portuguese poet, opium addict and art collector; and a doctor, who has built an art gallery in tropical Queensland. These characters are tied by more than their art, each dealing with questions of deception and discovery, counterfeiting and rewriting, transmission and identity and each stretching the bonds of trust and friendship.' (Publisher's blurb)
Epigraph: The Goldberg Variations...are a set of 30 variations for harpsichord by Johann Sebastian Bach. First published in 1741...the work is considered to be one of the most important examples of variation form. It is named after Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, who may have been the first performer.
Wikipedia
It is, in short, music which observes neither end nor beginning, music with neither real climax nor real resolution, music which like Baudelaire's lovers rests lightly on the wings of the unchecked wind.
Glenn Gould
Transcultural Writers and Novels in the Age of Global Mobility
Lafayette
:
Purdue University Press
,
2015
8887143
2015
single work
criticism
'In Transcultural Writers and Novels in the Age of Global Mobility, Arianna Dagnino analyzes a new type of literature emerging from artists’ increased movement and cultural flows spawned by globalization. This "transcultural" literature is produced by authors who write across cultural and national boundaries and who transcend in their lives and creative production the borders of a single culture. Dagnino's book contains a creative rendition of interviews conducted with five internationally renowned writers—Inez Baranay, Brian Castro, Alberto Manguel, Tim Parks, and Ilija Trojanow—and a critical exegesis reflecting on thematical, critical, and stylistical aspects.
'By studying the selected authors’ corpus of work, life experiences, and cultural orientations, Dagnino explores the implicit, often subconscious, process of cultural and imaginative metamorphosis that leads transcultural writers and their fictionalized characters beyond ethnic, national, racial, or religious loci of identity and identity formation. Drawing on the theoretical framework of comparative cultural studies, she offers insight into transcultural writing related to belonging, hybridity, cultural errancy, the "Other," worldviews, translingualism, deterritorialization, neonomadism, as well as genre, thematic patterns, and narrative techniques. Dagnino also outlines the implications of transcultural writing within the wider context of world literature(s) and identifies some of the main traits that characterize “transcultural novels.”' (Publication summary)
