Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Game of Thrones by Daniel Mendelsohn
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Daniel Mendelsohn is a name that whenever and wherever it appears, I will read what he has written. I know I will get a thoughtful, educated, serious examination of whatever topic, book, film, TV show, whatever it is. I will learn something new, be shown something in a new light, and will seek out new things to read or to look at. This collection comprises primarily essays previously published in the NY Review of Books or the New Yorker; so the material may not be new to subscribers, but many were new to me. And there is not a clinker in the bunch.
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.
View all my reviews