Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Brodsky, Joseph (Vol. 100) - Malcolm Bowie (review date 30 April 1993)

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Malcolm Bowie (review date 30 April 1993)

SOURCE: "In the Mobile Labyrinth," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4700, April 30, 1993, pp. 12-13.

[In the following excerpt from a comparative review of Brodsky's Watermark, Tony Tanner's Venice Desired, and Christopher Prendergast's Paris and the Nineteenth Century, Bowie praises Brodsky's unconventional depiction of Venice.]

[Joseph Brodsky's Watermark] …, which is not only an autobiographical essay but at moments a novella and a collection of epigrams, is cast as an irreverent riposte to the Venetian outpourings of the writers studied by Tony Tanner [in his Venice Desired]. How sumptuous and over-ripe Brodsky's spare notations make them all seem in their anxious quests for meaning. Even their negative epiphanies are impossibly fulsome when set against the street-corner incidents or failures of incident by which the nomadic poet measures out his...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Karen De Witt (essay date 10 December 1991)
   2. Authony Thwaite (review date 10 May 1992)
   3. David Streitfield (essay date 31 May 1992)
   4. Tony Whedon (essay date Winter 1993)
   5. Malcolm Bowie (review date 30 April 1993)
   6. David Patterson (essay date Summer 1993)
   7. Jacob Weisberg (review date Spring 1994)
   8. Robert D. McFadden (obituary date 29 January 1996)
   9. Martin Well (obituary date 29 January 1996)
   10. J. M. Coetzee (review date 1 February 1996)
   11. Tatyana Tolstaya (essay date 29 February 1996)
   12. Jessica Greenbaum (review date 12 February 1996)
   13. Michael Harris (review date 19 February 1996)
   14. Seamus Heaney (essay date 3 March 1996)
   15. Hugh Kenner (review date 14 April 1996)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright