Book review: Languages of Truth

Languages of Truth

Languages of Truth:
Essays 2003-2020
by Salman Rushdie
Random House
5/25/2021
368 pages
Nonfiction/Essays
Goodreads

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My discovery of Salman Rushdie’s writing is definitely not the normal one.
I have yet to read his most famous books. The only novel I have read so far is Quichotte, which I found quite impressive.

Even though I totally disagree with the author’s views on religion, I find him to be one of the most profound minds in literature today, and one of the most articulate voices, alongside the alas departed Umberto Eco, one of his friends, as expected. Les grands esprits se rencontrent.

So when I realized a volume of recent essays was being published —Languages of Truth is the third collection of his essays– I knew it was appropriate to spend more time with this brilliant author.  

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Who is Mark Twain?

Who Is Mark Twain?

by

Mark TWAIN

***

WHY I LOVED THIS BOOK

I have a love-hate relationship with Mark Twain, and I am probably not the only one.

Once, I saw a documentary on him, and I was rather appalled at his character, at how he evolved in relation to money issues, among other things.

But, I still enjoy so much his witty way of writing and criticizing quite a few things around him. I am also fascinated by his positions on language, for instance the “awful German language.”

This book is a collection of several essays by him, they are all pretty funny; my only disappointment is that some of them were unfinished.

ABOUT THE BOOK

“You had better shove this in the stove,” Mark Twain said at the top of an 1865 letter to his brother, “for I don’t want any absurd ‘literary remains’ and ‘unpublished letters of Mark Twain’ published after I am planted.” He was joking, of course. But when Mark Twain died in 1910, he left behind the largest collection of personal papers created by any nineteenth-century American author. Who Is Mark Twain? presents twenty-six wickedly funny, disarmingly relevant pieces by the American master—a man who was well ahead of his time.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born on November 30, 1835, in the village of Florida, Missouri. He attended the ordinary western common school until he was twelve, the last of his formal schooling. In a span of fifteen years he was successively a typesetter, a steamboat pilot, a soldier for three weeks, a silver miner, a newspaper reporter, and a bohemian in San Francisco known as “Mark Twain.” But in 1865, deeply in debt, he acknowledged a talent for “literature, of a low order, i.e., humorous.” In the next forty years, he published more than a dozen books and hundreds of shorter works, including his masterpiece, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

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