A decade later - Fundação Luso-Americana

elentless – yet funny – barbs, and rock
music and the Internet simply don’t exist).
But this approach is more of an idiosyncrasy
than a major fault. And the tone of
the writing is much more balanced than
in many of the author’s other pieces. In
these essays, Steiner, never displays a modicum
of paternalism or pretentiousness,
even when he resorts to the old professorial
saws about the decline of education.
Divided into four sections, you can
almost read this book of 400-odd pages
straight through without stopping. His
affection for such different authors as
Cioran, Orwell, Céline and Brecht; his
BooK revieWs
painstaking examination of topics such as
the Nuremberg Trials (see “From the
House of the Dead,” a remarkable critique
of the prison diaries of Nazi Minister
Albert Speer); his sensitivity to the cultural
import of non-literary works (such as
the significance of Webern’s musical compositions
to Central European culture and
later the West in general), in sum, the
unifying thread, created by the author, that
runs through this vast array of themes,
will impress even Steiner’s most faithful
readers. The sections in the book, “History
and Politics,” “Writers and Writing,”
“Thinkers,” and “Life Studies,” are well-
apportioned but are far from being decisive
or even necessary. The chief merit of
the way the essays is divided is that it does
not detract from the richness of the texts,
which, as any interested reader will soon
find out, is almost impossible to do.
1. The two-person translation was done by Joana Pedroso
Correia and Miguel Serras Pereira. There are a few typos
here and there and some clunkiness in the attempt to
transpose Steiner’s expressiveness into Portuguese, but
these do not ruin the end result. It is a pity though that
the publication dates of the original texts have not been
included. However, it doesn’t prevent them from being
read, and the omission may have come from the Englishlanguage
edition.
Parallel no. 6 | FALL | WINTER 2011 81
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