Odessa, Mon Amour

An Essay

by James Salter
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An essay on one of my favorite writers by one of my favorite writers! Thank you!

Babel is endlessly fascinating and disturbing, and the excerpt from "My First Goose" that Salter quotes is one of the great examples of the intersection of beauty and unease in Babel's work. I'd never before heard that Babel believed himself to have no imagination and to be unable to invent! Like everything else about Babel, this seems to be both true and untrue at the same time.