Volume 55, Number 20 · December 18, 2008
The Prodigious Pessimist
By Jonathan Raban
The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal
edited by Jay Parini
Doubleday, 458 pp., $27.50
In his essay about the top ten best-sellers on the New York Times fiction list of January 7, 1973, Gore Vidal gave a characteristically withering notice ('Tolstoi hangs over the work like a mushroom cloud') to Solzhenitsyn's August 1914. He finished with the remark, 'I fear that the best one can say of Solzhenitsyn is goré vidal (a Russian phrase meaning 'he has seen grief').' I'd always taken this as a joke—rather a below-par joke by Vidal's standards—until I checked it out with my Russian housecleaner.
Review, 4029 words
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