Tag Archives: Robert Pogue Harrison

Another Look’s 10th Anniversary pick: Glenway Wescott’s The Pilgrim Hawk: A Love Story on Wednesday, October 5!

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Another Look was launched in November 2012, with William Maxwell’s So Long See You Tomorrow. Now we celebrate our tenth anniversary with another wonderful and too-little-known book, Glenway Wescott‘s 1940 novella The Pilgrim Hawk: A Love Story (NYRB Classics). The event will take place at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, October 5, at Levinthal Hall in the Stanford Humanities Center, 424 Santa Teresa Street, on the Stanford campus. The event will also be livestreamed. Come celebrate our tenth with us! 

Registration is encouraged, but walk-ins are always welcome. Register here.

The Book

The Pilgrim Hawk: A Love Story traces a single afternoon in a French country house during the 1920s. Alwyn Tower, an American expatriate and sometime novelist, is staying with a friend outside Paris when a well-heeled Irish couple drops in — with Lucy, their trained hawk, a restless, sullen, disturbingly totemic presence. Lunch is prepared, drink flows, and the story that unfolds is both harrowing and farcical.

Novelist Michael Cunningham in his introduction calls the book “murderously precise and succinct.” Critic and author Susan Sontag said, “The ever-astonishing Pilgrim Hawk belongs, in my view, among the treasures of twentieth-century literature, however untypical are its sleek, subtle vocabulary, the density of its attention to character, its fastidious pessimism, and the clipped worldliness of its point of view.”


The Panelists

The panelists will include a special guest, Steve Wasserman, former book editor at the Los Angeles Times Book Review and editor at large for the Yale University Press, and now publisher of Heyday Books in Berkeley. Other panelists will include: Stanford Prof. Robert Pogue Harrison, author, director of Another Look, host of the radio talk show and podcast series Entitled Opinions, and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books; Stanford Prof. Tobias Wolff, one of America’s leading writers, a founding director of Another Look, and a recipient of the National Medal of Arts. Author Cynthia L. Haven, a National Endowment for the Humanities public scholar, will round out the panel.


The Venue

Some of you may remember that Levinthal Hall is where Another Look began a decade ago. You’re right! Our audience attendance outgrew that venue in 2015, and we moved to a larger space. However, now we are offering virtual as well as in-person attendance, which allows us to return to our former home. We will announce how to register for the virtual event in our next email, as we are still finalizing arrangements.

Parking

Metered parking spaces are available along Santa Teresa Street. Parking is free after 4 p.m. Free parking is also available on the lot adjacent to the Stanford Humanities Center after 4 p.m.

How to get the book

Books are available at Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park (650-324-4321) and Books Inc at Town & Country in Palo Alto (650-321-0600). We’d recommend calling first to make sure a book is waiting for you. Books are also available at Amazon and at Abebooks. If all else fails, you can order directly from the publisher here.

Our October 5 event is sponsored by Stanford Continuing Studies, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages.

A triumph for Sándor Márai’s little-known classic Embers

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If you felt a slight tremor in the earth on Wednesday, October 18, the epicenter was at Stanford’s Encina Hall. The Another Look book club took on Sándor Márai‘s Embers – and the whole room rocked!

The event was close to a record-breaker, with about two hundred participants – not bad for an off-the-beaten track Hungarian novel (and only equaled by Zora Neale Hurston‘s Their Eyes Were Watching God).

Sándor Márai’s taut and mesmerizing novel, published in 1942, opens in a secluded Hungarian castle, where an old general awaits a reunion with a friend. It is 1940, and he has not appeared in public for decades. The long-estranged companions talk all night – or rather, the general talks, as the evasive visitor listens to the general discuss love, intimacy, honor, betrayal, and a beautiful, long-dead wife.

The novel is set against the backdrop of the disintegrated Austro-Hungarian empire, and shares the melancholy wisdom of its narrator: “We not only act, talk, think, dream, we also hold our silence about something. All our lives we are silent about who we are, which only we know, and about which we can speak to no one. Yet we know that who we are and what we cannot speak about constitutes the ‘truth.’ We are that about which we hold our silence.”

Acclaimed author Robert Pogue Harrison moderated the discussion. The Stanford professor who is Another Look’s director writes regularly for The New York Review of Books and hosts the popular talk show, Entitled Opinions. He was joined by renowned author and National Medal of Arts winner Tobias Wolff, professor emeritus of English at Stanford, and Jane Shaw, Stanford’s Dean for Religious Life at Stanford.

Toby Wolff, Another Look’s founding director, opened by praising the courage of author Márai to sit down and create a remarkable novel about an all-night conversation – two men meet, but only one of them talks, and they persevere till dawn. The end. A daunting creative challenge that Márai pulls off magnificently.

We were happy to see a lively Hungarian contingent in the audience, too – including the Hungarian Consul General for the Bay Area. And boy, did the Hungarians have a different take on the book – they praised Carol Brown Janeway‘s translation, but said that the richness of their native tongue is AWOL. And while Márai is little known west of the Danube, they assured us his books are everywhere in Budapest.

The podcast is here. And all photos, as always, are by by loyal Another Look aficionado David Schwartz.

From Another Look’s new director, Robert Pogue Harrison

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When I attended the last meeting of Another Look this past spring, I knew that no one had offered to take over for Tobias. Seeing the crush of people at Levinthal Hall fifteen minutes before starting time, with standing room only, eager to hear a discussion of Albert Camus’s The Stranger, I realized how much this book series means to people at Stanford and in the surrounding community. I felt it would be a real shame to let it let it die, so I offered to take over the directorship from Tobias.  We worked things out with Continuing Studies, which has generously agreed to sponsor the series’ continuation – and here we are, ready to go.
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I read A Month in the Country about ten years ago and was enchanted by its style, landscapes, and themes. If any book fits the bill of Another Look – namely, a short novel from the past that richly deserves another look – it is Carr’s gem of a narrative, which takes on all sorts of different sorts of hues, depending on how you view it.
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