5/18/2023 0 Comments The library book by orlean“The Library Book” is about the fire and the mystery of how it started - but in some ways that’s the least of it. The discovery nudged her into the ring again. “Working on them felt like a slow-motion wrestling match.” But after moving to Los Angeles seven years ago, around the time her book about Rin Tin Tin was published, she learned that the city’s Central Library had suffered a catastrophic fire in 1986. “I had decided I was done with writing books,” she writes. Orlean’s work in general has that elusive quality to it: exquisitely written, consistently entertaining and irreducible to anything so obvious and pedestrian as a theme.Įven Orlean herself, a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, admits to feeling overwhelmed by her idiosyncratic vision her newest volume, “The Library Book,” almost didn’t happen. When writing about the books of Susan Orlean, it’s hard not to feel like the neurotic Charlie Kaufman character in the film “Adaptation,” sweating in front of his typewriter as he tries to work on a screen adaptation of Orlean’s “The Orchid Thief.” He worries that her book is too sprawling and bountiful to cram into a contrived Hollywood plot, and he ends up just thinking about the banana nut muffin he wants to eat.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |