The Craft of Fiction

ISBN: 9781331650546 出版年：2016 页码：280 Percy Lubbock Forgotten Books

To grasp the shadowy and fantasmal form of a book, to hold it fast, to turn it over and survey it at leisure - that is the effort of a critic of books, and it is perpetually defeated. Nothing, no power, will keep a book steady and motionless before us, so that we may have time to examine its shape and design. As quickly as we read, it melts and shifts in the memory; even at the moment when the last page is turned, a great part of the book, its finer detail, is already vague and doubtful. A little later, after a few days or months, how much is really left of it? A cluster of impressions, some clear points emerging from a mist of uncertainty, this is all we can hope to possess, generally speaking, in the name of a book.