From Publishers Weekly
Bayley is best known as the late Iris Murdoch's devoted husband, but for most of his life, he has also been a professor and literary critic in his own right. This extensive collection of criticism attests to the breadth of his knowledge, his range of interests and his generosity as a reader of the great literature of the 19th and 20th centuries. In this volume, Bailey proves himself endlessly curious—as he notes in the introduction, he learned to read Russian in order to read Pushkin, and then went on to tackle Tolstoy, Akhmatova and the rest. In the majority of these essays—most culled from the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement—Bayley revisits a single writer's life and oeuvre. Selected by Carey, the New Yorker's literary editor, the essays are arranged chronologically according to the writers' births rather than when the pieces were written. The result minimizes the developments in Bayley's attitudes and style, but that's a small price to pay for such erudite and enthusiastic considerations of literature. (Mar.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Bayley began teaching English literature at Oxford in 1955 and soon thereafter began writing reviews, mutually beneficial pursuits that have made him an exceptionally agile reader and a graceful critic. In his introduction to this grand, beautifully titled collection of essays, Bayley details the pleasures of reviewing, and his delight in writing criticism truly is evident in each of the essays judiciously gathered here. Bayley, also the author of two striking memoirs, including Elegy for Iris (1999), his haunting tribute to his late wife, Iris Murdoch, takes on English literature with dash, revisiting Laurence Sterne, Jane Austen, and Graham Greene, but he is even more passionate in his engagement with an acquired love, Russian literature, writing richly referenced and marvelously conversational assessments of Pushkin, Babel, and Chekhov, among many others. Bayley also writes incisively about key American poets and offers groundbreaking interpretations of such Eastern European writers as Milan Kundera, Witold Gombrowicz, and Paul Celan. Astute not only in matters of aesthetics but also in the ways literature mirrors, and, perhaps, effects social change, Bayley is at once worldly and companionable. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Book Description
A magnum opus and a cause for celebration from one of the world's foremost critics. Beginning his career at Oxford in the 1950s, the ever-incisive John Bayley has been one of the great bulwarks—in the tradition of William Hazlitt and Edmund Wilson—of twentieth-century world literature, and his distinctive sensibility has reshaped tastes and theories more than was previously realized. Here, in The Power of Delight, a volume that has been assembled with the assistance of The New Yorker editor Leo Carey, we see at last the full range of Bayley's life and work, divided into eight sections that include "English Literature," "Russian Novels," and "American Poetry." A wide-ranging guide to essential reading, The Power of Delight examines classics, neglected gems, and masterpieces of our time—from Jane Austen to Milan Kundera, Leo Tolstoy to John Ashbery, and from Robert Lowell's messy persona to George Orwell's self-canonization.
About the Author
John Bayley is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and a retired professor at Oxford University. He is the author of Elegy for Iris, a memoir. He lives in Oxford.
The Power of Delight: A Lifetime in Literature: Essays 1962-2002 FROM THE PUBLISHER
John Bayley swept to international fame with the publication of his memoirs about his late wife, the novelist Iris Murdoch, and the subsequent film of them, but for decades he has been known to readers the world over as perhaps the shrewdest and subtlest literary critic now writing. The Power of Delight gathers together for the first time the cream of a lifetime's work.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
Bayley is best known as the late Iris Murdoch's devoted husband, but for most of his life, he has also been a professor and literary critic in his own right. This extensive collection of criticism attests to the breadth of his knowledge, his range of interests and his generosity as a reader of the great literature of the 19th and 20th centuries. In this volume, Bailey proves himself endlessly curious-as he notes in the introduction, he learned to read Russian in order to read Pushkin, and then went on to tackle Tolstoy, Akhmatova and the rest. In the majority of these essays-most culled from the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement-Bayley revisits a single writer's life and oeuvre. Selected by Carey, the New Yorker's literary editor, the essays are arranged chronologically according to the writers' births rather than when the pieces were written. The result minimizes the developments in Bayley's attitudes and style, but that's a small price to pay for such erudite and enthusiastic considerations of literature. (Mar.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
Grand litterateur Bayley offers his life's work, with essays grouped by topics ranging from Russian novels to American poetry. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
A generous display of the indefatigable British critic's wares: nearly 70 informed, eloquent, and endlessly stimulating book reviews and literary essays. They're grouped mostly by genre and nationality-and there are few fields of interest about which this ineffably generous uncommon reader doesn't have something interesting to say. Rummaging through "English Literature," he celebrates the productively "divided natures" of Dickens and Hardy, Trollope's mastery of the quotidian, and the achievements of those "self-created" geniuses George Orwell and T.E. Lawrence. Perusing "The English Poets," he notes Keats's appropriation of "the Shakespearean spirit," and gives overdue homage to Tennyson in a penetrating assessment keenly sensitive to the poet's ingenuous impetuosity and very real greatness. "Mother Russia" gathers knowledgeable appreciations of Pushkin's profound influence on the 19th-century novel, the unjustly neglected Ivan Bunin (whose "descriptive prose is alive in the same absolute sense as that of D.H. Lawrence"), and those indigenous, ultimately un-translatable great poets Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva. Bayley seems less astute on "American Poetry," though he responds strongly to Whitman's infectious ebullience, and memorably pinpoints the elusive John Ashbery's poetic method as "romantic alchemy." Few could match his comprehension of 20th-century writing "Out of Eastern Europe"-or have developed the rich variations he works on the observation that "so many European poets, who . . . [endured] the Second World War, have written in consequence a poetry of extreme simplicity and precision"-in revelatory analyses of Paul Celan, Zbigniew Herbert, and Czeslaw Milosz. Furtherbrief pieces praise Stendhal's salutary egoism, Angela Carter's inventive feminism, the intellectual symbiosis shared by Henry and William James, and intellectual combat that kept Leo and Sophia Tolstoy together (and apart), and, in a fine ending essay, Gore Vidal's brilliant memoir Palimpsest. Bayley is England's Edmund Wilson, and reading him on reading others truly is an education.
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