The Attraction of Things - Softcover

Lewinter, Roger; Careau, Rachel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0811225208 ISBN 13: 9780811225205

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016

Synopsis

The Attraction of Things concerns the entirety of beauty and the possibility of grace, relayed via obsessions with rare early gramophone records, the theater, translation, dying parents: all these elements are relayed in a dizzying strange traffic of cultural artifacts, friendships, losses, discoveries, and love. Roger Lewinter believes that in the realm of art, "the distinction between life and death loses its relevance, the one taking place in the other."

Whereas Story of Love in Solitude is a group of small stories, The Attraction of Things is a continuous narrative (more or less) of a man seeking (or stumbling upon) enlightenment.

"The Attraction of Things," states Lewinter, "is the story of a being who lets himself go toward what attracts him, toward what he attracts--beings, works, things--and who, through successive encounters, finds the way out of the labyrinth, to the heart, where the bolt of illumination strikes. This is the story of a letting go toward the illumination."

About this title

About the Authors

Roger Lewinter was born in Montauban, France, in 1941, to Austrian Jewish parents. The family moved to Switzerland during the war, and he has lived much of his life in Geneva. For more than forty years he has worked as a writer (of both literary and scholarly works), an editor, and a translator (of Georg Groddeck, Karl Kraus, Elias Canetti, Robert Walser, and Rilke, among others). Among his dozen books are three works of fiction.

Rachel Careau is a writer and translator and the author of one book of prose poems, Itineraries. She is working on a translation of Roger Lewinter's L'Apparat de l'âme.

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0811225208
• ISBN 13: 9780811225205
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 128