Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Poetic Obituaries: [John] Updike said that his aim was

to "give the mundane its beautiful due", and he had an uncanny ability to find the right words to conjure up scene and character. His description of "the physical fact of a horse--the pungent, assaultive hugeness of the animal and the sense of a tiny spark, a gleam of skittish and limited intelligence, within its monstrous long skull"--is immediately evocative. Likewise his "clean, sad scent of linoleum", or the "hoarse olfactory shout" of a football stadium. Adam Mars Jones declared that, if he should ever go blind, tapes of Updike's novels would be his best reminder of the visual world.

from Telegraph: John Updike
also The Guardian: John Updike, chronicler of American loves and losses, dies at 76

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