Reviews for Vermeer in Bosnia

The average rating for Vermeer in Bosnia based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-04-27 00:00:00 Alan Long This collection of long and shorter articles by Weschler are exquisite examples of pattern recognition. Connecting Vermeer's Lacemaker with the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal, talking about the light in Los Angeles (and he's spot on with that one), detailing Roman Polanski's background, each essay in prose that makes one's heart sing, is a beautiful offering. On to read more Weschler, even though I keep trying to move that "s" in his last name. To top it off, I now know how Spock got his hand greeting..."Vulcan as a sort of cosmically Wandering Jew" p. 263 p.66: "And indeed, Serbian culture is pickled in the brine of the epic, the heroic, the mythomanic..the endless cycle of mindless atrocity and atrocious retribution." p.70: "indicted war criminals...whether in Serbia, the Republika Srpska, or Croatia, have been almost entirely successful in convincing their countrymen that the Tribunal's animus is directed toward all the people as a whole rather than any specific individuals, so that vigilant defiance becomes almost a patriotic imperative." p.94: "Years later, in her review of Macbeth, Pauline Kael noted how it is not the amount of violence in Polanski's films that so unsettles the viewer as much as the way that violence 'always [occurs] a shade faster than you expect, so that you're not prepared.'" p.153: Jerzy Urban--"gutter con brio" p.164: "This is what the Holocaust produced, what it honed--a generation of individuals who regularly attempted to lash out at the walls while at the same time holding up the ceiling." 207: "Here it's true," one assures the other, "I'm a dachshund. But in the old country I was a Saint Bernard." p.252: "We are here...because without us here to study it, the amazing complexity of the world would be wasted." p.341: "Hockney's collages, like Cubism, are a record of human looking. It's exactly the point that an automatic machine could not have generated them."

Review # 2 was written on 2019-01-05 00:00:00 Michael fleming Weschler's temporally and topically wide-ranging collection has fed my love of creative nonfiction, and specifically of writing that "worries out the threads" between art, history, biography and politics. I picked up this book, almost at random, at a used bookstore, initially fascinated by its title but then pulled in by the first piece, "In Lieu of a Preface: Why I Can't Write Fiction" ("I wouldn't be able to invent a fictional New York housewife, because the city as it is is already overcrowded-there are no apartments available, there is no more room in the phone book.") Thankfully, Weschler's inability to write fiction means he has devoted himself to creatively engaging with all kinds of non-fictional things. His "Balkan Triptych" finds the relevance of Vermeer, Shakespeare, and Aristotle during and in the aftermath of the Bosnian War, while "Three Polish Survivor Stories" provides complex portraits of Roman Polanski, Jerzy Urban, and Art Spiegelman. Grandfathers and daughters, L.A., and a series of artist profiles round out the two-decade body of work presented here. I finished it inspired, and looking forward to more.