If we were to explore the digits of pi far enough, they might resolve into a breathtaking numerical pattern, as knotty as "The Book of Kells," and it might mean something.
Translated doubly, as with all of Kadare's writing, from Albanian to French to English (the former by Jusuf Vrioni and the latter by the accomplished David Bellos, biographer and translator of the entrancingly knotty Georges Perec), the book is unsteady.
She had written a knotty but keen book about Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School of philosophy ("The Origin of Negative Dialectics") and admired the philosopher Walter Benjamin, who himself went on a pilgrimage to Moscow in the 1920's.
Now in "Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life," a knotty and enlightening book, chapters about philosophers are paired with chapters about films: Emerson and "The Philadelphia Story," Locke and "Adam's Rib," Nietzsche and "Now, Voyager," Aristotle and "The Awful Truth".
I've never found that the direct full-frontal approach to some knotty problem in a book works very well.
The general nonfiction award went to Andrew Solomon for "Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity," which Dwight Garner called a "knotty, gargantuan and lionhearted" book.
This knotty, gargantuan and lionhearted book introduces us to families that are coping with things like deafness, dwarfism, Down syndrome, autism and schizophrenia.
The book's knottiest chapter is the last, on "Value", in which Eagleton considers various criteria for what literary value might be and gleefully demolishes them all.
In the Barrytown trilogy, family sat solidly at the books' heart – knotty, certainly, but cherished, relied upon; in Paddy Clarke, although the story is one of familial breakdown, the institution itself is never questioned.
The book raises some knotty questions about idealism.
