Volume 29, Number 8 · May 13, 1982
Flushed with Ideas
By Al Alvarez
Levitation: Five Fictions
by Cynthia Ozick
Knopf, 158 pp., $11.50
Waking
by Eva Figes
Pantheon, 88 pp., $7.95
Ezra Pound once divided writers into carvers and molders. The molders—Balzac, Lawrence, Whitman—work fast, not much worried by detail or repetition or precision, impatient to get down the shape and flow of their inspiration, while the carvers—Flaubert, Eliot, Beckett—work with infinite slowness, painstakingly writing and rewriting, unable to go ahead until each phrase is balanced, each detail perfect.
Review, 2309 words
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