Authors Electric

"The other one he loved like a slave, like a madman and like a beggar. Why? Ask the dust on the road and the falling leaves, ask the mysterious God of life; for no one knows such things. She gave him nothing, no nothing did she give him and yet he thanked her. She said: Give me your peace and your reason! And he was only sorry she did not ask for his life." That’s Lt. Glahn speaking, in Knut Hamsun’s 1894 novel, Pan. Later, John Fante would take one of the phrases there for the title of his 1939 novel, Ask the Dust:   The dust, of course, is unlikely to render many answers, and yet it has been a preoccupation of literature since its beginning… “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust…”                                     Book of Common Prayer “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,...

The Russian, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, has been oft-described as one of the first “psychological novelists”; followed up, some would say, by the 1890 publication of HUNGER by the starving, post-tubercular Norwegian, Knut Hamsun. Tough books, coming from the toughest of experiences/life stories…nothing precious about Dostoyevsky or Hamsun. They both seemed to set down the facts/details of a decade of suffering and survival in a first book: Dostoyevsky in HOUSE OF THE DEAD, Hamsun in HUNGER. But, this done, they would tend to let the imagination and spirit soar in the following books…the facts and details of their histories still embedded there though, felt, sensed, like psychological rock strata, unyielding. D. H. Lawrence, the English miner’s son, took on the “psychological” penetration of that rock strata next, delving deep, fusing the exploration with elements of impassioned drama and story which brought such a potent mix of public acclaim/disapprobation. While, in Cze...