conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know a description for a book titled Waiting for the Barbarians about BRAND, BOOK.WE, PROVIDE with the genre: Literature & Fiction, World Literature?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: THIS IS BRAND NEW BOOK.WE PROVIDE 100% CUSTOMER SATISFACTION.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know a description for a book titled Waiting for the Barbarians about ldquo;Edward, Said&rsquo;s, Khoury with the genre: Politics & Social Sciences, Politics & Government?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: &ldquo;Edward Said&rsquo;s anger against injustice must become ours, and his pen that challenged the sword must become our weapon in the battle for human values.&rdquo;&#8212;Elias Khoury
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know the first five paragraphs for this book?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Waiting for the Barbarians
  I have read it and think it a very good and appealing way of dealing with the subject. Although the ship is lost, the spirit which animates the Royal Navy is clearly brought out....
  Coward was never to get over feeling slighted by the way his hard work during the war was continually misrepresented by the English press—among other things, much was made of a quite innocent tax mistake early on in the war, which gave Churchill grounds for blocking a knighthood. These feelings, along with the devastatingly onerous tax strictures after the war, led this most English of entertainers into tax exile, first in Jamaica and then in Switzerland.
  This is not to say that he ever lost his sense of humor, which glints and flashes through virtually every page of Day's collection, from its descriptions of the many exotic places his travels took him—a letter he sent while on a government-sponsored intelligence-gathering trip to Russia before the war describes the country as being "exactly like a whole world composed of the Whitechapel Road on August Bank Holiday"—to the sly signatures he'd append to his letters from Paris, where he worked in 1940 for the British propaganda service: "DREYFUS," say, or "GERMAINE DE STAEL." What's remarkable here is how innocent the humor most often is; Coward's letters are strikingly free of backbiting or bitchiness, and when he sharpens his pen, it's hardly with the intent to kill:
  So there is much to dazzle here, in just the way we expect from a very Noël Coward sort of person. As the years and pages go by, it's often amusing to see Coward smoothly dealing with the great—in 1938 he writes that he is taking "the [Anthony] Edens and the Gary Coopers out to dinner" after Eden was forced to recite a public apologia for Chamberlain's "Peace in Our Time" (to his credit, Coward had a lifelong loathing of Chamberlain)—and the merely glitzy: "We dined with Mike Todd and Liz [Taylor] who was hung with rubies and diamonds and looked like a pregnant Pagoda." Of particular note is his correspondence with his close friend Marlene Dietrich, particularly during her tortured love affair, during the 1950s, with Yul Brynner—an exchange that sheds sympathetic light not only on Coward's loyalty but on Dietrich as well. "I long so for intelligence and brain food," the worldly star managed to sigh even in the midst of being humiliated by the younger, married Brynner.
  What is striking about this volume of correspondence by the twentieth century's archetype of urbane elegance, however, is the degree to which it's devoted to family and the intimate friends to whom Coward would remain so impressively loyal: his secretary Lorn Lorraine, his great friend Gladys Calthrop, the actress Joyce Carey, the inner circle on whom he liked to heap the improbable nicknames of which he was so fond ("Snig," "Snog," "Poj"). To them particularly he loved to address epistles composed in light verse, a form of which he was a master and which, as his letter home for Christmas 1939 indicates, was not necessarily limited to martinis and cigarette holders:
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know four more paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Making people uncomfortable—and describing people who are uncomfortable in their own skin—are what Franzen has always been good at doing in his writing: discomfort, conflict, and a hopeless awkwardness have been his great subjects. That they are now the focus of his new collection raises interesting questions—questions very much on readers' minds these days, when the divide between truth and fiction seems increasingly to be blurred—about the relationship between a writer's real life and his fictional work.
  These voices echo throughout Franzen's thin and insubstantial new collection, whose greatest virtue, in the end, may be that the essays collected here clearly identify the real-life sources of the fiction, which is often so strong. The question that arises is: Do we really need to be this intimate with the inspiration for the novels?
  The problem here is not one of structure but of content—and, seriously, of tone. An inevitable danger of memoir is the necessary self-absorption of the writer—one that the best memoirists know how to leaven by means of either self-deprecation or humor, or both. But there's a grimness here, a bitterness, that is not only off-putting in large quantities but spoils the many vignettes in which Franzen seems to want to present himself as a nerd or a loser we can identify with. A wrong note always sounds. Such moments remind you a bit of what Franzen sounded like when he was making his apology to Oprah—there's a hard edge here, a sense of resentment masquerading as abjection.
  If these pronouncements seem calculated to offend, I suspect it's because Franzen wanted to be rigorous and ruthless with himself—wanted, that is, to write about the self without recourse to the glib narratives of redemption so characteristic of memoir just now, without romanticizing his faults. To strip away the layers of self-congratulation (to say nothing of flat-out lies) that we so often get in "personal histories," in other words, and to say, in effect, "I am an imperfect person and this is what it looks like to be that imperfect person—to insufficiently love one's fellow man, one's parents, one's spouse, even oneself." This in itself is admirable. Ideally, the memoirist's revelation of himself should seduce readers into a comparable willingness to examine themselves and their lives without vanity, without props. In this way, a literary experience can lead to a profound life experience.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Add another sentence about There's, homonym, unaccustomed, considering, learning, killed.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Making people uncomfortable—and describing people who are uncomfortable in their own skin—are what Franzen has always been good at doing in his writing: discomfort, conflict, and a hopeless awkwardness have been his great subjects. That they are now the focus of his new collection raises interesting questions—questions very much on readers' minds these days, when the divide between truth and fiction seems increasingly to be blurred—about the relationship between a writer's real life and his fictional work. 
  These voices echo throughout Franzen's thin and insubstantial new collection, whose greatest virtue, in the end, may be that the essays collected here clearly identify the real-life sources of the fiction, which is often so strong. The question that arises is: Do we really need to be this intimate with the inspiration for the novels?
  The problem here is not one of structure but of content—and, seriously, of tone. An inevitable danger of memoir is the necessary self-absorption of the writer—one that the best memoirists know how to leaven by means of either self-deprecation or humor, or both. But there's a grimness here, a bitterness, that is not only off-putting in large quantities but spoils the many vignettes in which Franzen seems to want to present himself as a nerd or a loser we can identify with. A wrong note always sounds. There's a narrative about a grade school "homonym bee," in which he recalls, of his youthful self, that he "was very much unaccustomed to considering the interior states of people other than myself"; this no doubt accounts for his apparent lack of feeling, at the time, on learning that his opponent in the bee was killed in a car crash. Such moments remind you a bit of what Franzen sounded like when he was making his apology to Oprah—there's a hard edge here, a sense of resentment masquerading as abjection. 
  If these pronouncements seem calculated to offend, I suspect it's because Franzen wanted to be rigorous and ruthless with himself—wanted, that is, to write about the self without recourse to the glib narratives of redemption so characteristic of memoir just now, without romanticizing his faults. To strip away the layers of self-congratulation (to say nothing of flat-out lies) that we so often get in "personal histories," in other words, and to say, in effect, "I am an imperfect person and this is what it looks like to be that imperfect person—to insufficiently love one's fellow man, one's parents, one's spouse, even oneself. " This in itself is admirable. Ideally, the memoirist's revelation of himself should seduce readers into a comparable willingness to examine themselves and their lives without vanity, without props. In this way, a literary experience can lead to a profound life experience.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know the last five paragraphs? End with the sentence '
  And the novel's last lines make a final overt allusion to Sontag herself, one that suggests that she saw her political engagement as an expression of this "romantic" side:'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The passage is wholly typical. Apart from the characteristic tension between the mind ("Intellectually, I know why") and the heart, and a certain awkwardness reflected in the stiffness and the circuitousness of the language ("I do wonder if I haven't repressed something there"), the statement represents yet another triumph of that ferocious intellect at the expense of the realm of feelings. Note the reflexively disdainful dismissal of any possibility that she might have spoken publicly about issues relating to homosexuality as a merely sentimental gesture, a treacly project of "giving comfort."
  My point is not to correct Sontag politically; nor do I want to denigrate the significant positive effects of her political arguments and activities. Everyone, after all, is self-interpreting and self-inventing—writers and artists more than most. Sontag was a true cosmopolitan, and that is an achievement not only of morality but also of imagination. But cosmopolitanism, too, is a set of choices, and Sontag's choices in the realm of politics strikingly resemble her choices in the realm of literature and culture. At a certain point you have to ask why there was this unquenchable need to comfort, this limitless sympathy, for Bosnians but not for lesbians.
  I'm checking on what's in the world. What's left. What's discarded. What's no longer cherished. What had to be sacrificed. What someone thought might interest someone else... there may be something valuable, there. Not valuable, exactly. But something I would want. Want to rescue. Something that speaks to me. To my longings.
  The metaphor of the collector is the perfect one for Sontag. Her impressive sympathy for Hamilton, with his great hunger for inanimate objects, explains so much about her—the unbelievable avidity, the impossibility of satiety, the need to possess it all, to know "everything." And it provides, too, another explanation for her incessant promotion, toward the end of her career, of "greatness": like all good collectors, she wanted you to know how precious her objects were, how much they were worth. Small wonder that some of her most intense aesthetic enthusiasms were inspired by collectors: William Hamilton; Walter Benjamin, in his library and in the arcades; Godard. She wrote feelingly about the latter's "hypertrophy of appetite for culture (though often more avid for cultural debris than for museum-consecrated achievements); they proceed by voraciously scavenging in culture, proclaiming that nothing is alien to their art." It would be hard to think of a better description of Sontag herself.
  And the novel's last lines make a final overt allusion to Sontag herself, one that suggests that she saw her political engagement as an expression of this "romantic" side:
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know the first paragraph for this book?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Waiting for the Barbarians
  From horizon to horizon the earth is white with snow. It falls from a sky in which the source of light is diffuse and everywhere present, as though the sun has dissolved into mist, become an aura. In the dream I pass through the barracks gate, pass the bare flagpole. The square extends before me, blending at its edges into the luminous sky. Walls, trees, houses have dwindled, lost their solidity, retired over the rim of the world.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know three more paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: And worse. Under the monotonous regimen of soup and porridge and tea, it has become an agony for me to move my bowels. I hesitate for days feeling stiff and bloated before I can bring myself to squat over the pail and endure the stabs of pain, the tearing of tissues that accompany these evacuations.
  No one beats me, no one starves me, no one spits on me. How can I regard myself as a victim of persecution when my sufferings are so petty? Yet they are all the more degrading for their pettiness. I remember smiling when the door first closed behind me and the key turned in the lock. It seemed no great infliction to move from the solitariness of everyday existence to the solitude of a cell when I could bring with me a world of thoughts and memories. But now I begin to comprehend how rudimentary freedom is. What freedom has been left to me? The freedom to eat or go hungry; to keep my silence or gabble to myself or beat on the door or scream.
  My evening meal is brought by the cook's little grandson. I am sure it puzzles him that the old Magistrate has been shut up all alone in a dark room, but he asks no questions. He enters very erect and proud, bearing the tray, while the guard holds the door open. "Thank you," I say, "I'm so glad you have come, I was getting so hungry..." I rest my hand on his shoulder, filling the space between us with human words, while he waits gravely for me to taste and approve. "And how is your granny today?"
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Add another sentence about locked.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: And worse. Under the monotonous regimen of soup and porridge and tea, it has become an agony for me to move my bowels. I hesitate for days feeling stiff and bloated before I can bring myself to squat over the pail and endure the stabs of pain, the tearing of tissues that accompany these evacuations. 
  No one beats me, no one starves me, no one spits on me. How can I regard myself as a victim of persecution when my sufferings are so petty? Yet they are all the more degrading for their pettiness. I remember smiling when the door first closed behind me and the key turned in the lock. It seemed no great infliction to move from the solitariness of everyday existence to the solitude of a cell when I could bring with me a world of thoughts and memories. But now I begin to comprehend how rudimentary freedom is. What freedom has been left to me? The freedom to eat or go hungry; to keep my silence or gabble to myself or beat on the door or scream. If I was the object of an injustice, a minor injustice, when they locked me in here, I am now no more than a pile of blood, bone and meat that is unhappy. 
  My evening meal is brought by the cook's little grandson. I am sure it puzzles him that the old Magistrate has been shut up all alone in a dark room, but he asks no questions. He enters very erect and proud, bearing the tray, while the guard holds the door open. "Thank you," I say, "I'm so glad you have come, I was getting so hungry... " I rest my hand on his shoulder, filling the space between us with human words, while he waits gravely for me to taste and approve. "And how is your granny today?"
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know the last five paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The wind has dropped, and now the snowflakes come floating down, the first fall of the year, flecking the rooftiles with white. All morning I stand at my window watching the snow fall. When I cross the barracks yard it is already inches deep and my footsteps crunch with an eerie lightness.
  In the middle of the square there are children at play building a snowman. Anxious not to alarm them, but inexplicably joyful, I approach them across the snow.
  They are not alarmed, they are too busy to cast me a glance. They have completed the great round body, now they are rolling a ball for the head.
  They settle the head on the shoulders and fill it out with pebbles for eyes, ears, nose and mouth. One of them crowns it with his cap.
  This is not the scene I dreamed of. Like much else nowadays I leave it feeling stupid, like a man who lost his way long ago but presses on along a road that may lead nowhere.