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gerbieHoward Moss – Instant lives & more (03-012)
I don’t know why it was on my shelf, apart from the little price tag that says 1 gulden. I must have bought it in the American Bookstore in Amsterdam, at a sale. The short stories in this book first appeared in The New York Review of Books, I guess somewhere in the seventies, as this book is from the early eighties. 34 from 37 stories are about some celebrity. From Louisa Mat Alcott, via Bach, Beethoven, Ford, Huxley, Ibsen, Proust and Stein to Oscar Wilde.
I’m not sure what the idea was, but I guess it was an attempt to describe an average day in the life of an artist, before he/she became the legend they are nowadays. Not a bad idea, I have to admit, if it wasn’t for the stories being boring. Moss either knows so much about their lives and really tries to show that in a short, less than two page story, or he is just a pretentious show off. At the moment I tend to go for the second conclusion. Whatever it is, I managed to finish the book, though I have to admit I ended scan reading the last few stories. Not my type of book I guess.
I don’t know why it was on my shelf, apart from the little price tag that says 1 gulden. I must have bought it in the American Bookstore in Amsterdam, at a sale. The short stories in this book first appeared in The New York Review of Books, I guess somewhere in the seventies, as this book is from the early eighties. 34 from 37 stories are about some celebrity. From Louisa Mat Alcott, via Bach, Beethoven, Ford, Huxley, Ibsen, Proust and Stein to Oscar Wilde.
I’m not sure what the idea was, but I guess it was an attempt to describe an average day in the life of an artist, before he/she became the legend they are nowadays. Not a bad idea, I have to admit, if it wasn’t for the stories being boring. Moss either knows so much about their lives and really tries to show that in a short, less than two page story, or he is just a pretentious show off. At the moment I tend to go for the second conclusion. Whatever it is, I managed to finish the book, though I have to admit I ended scan reading the last few stories. Not my type of book I guess.
