Analysis
West has an eclectic style. Common themes in his works include psychic abuse, failed relationships, and societal inadequacy. However, there is also a strong sense of self-discovery and survival. His works are an outpouring on his view of the human condition. In an interview with David W. Madden, West remarked that he always listens to some kind of classical music while writing and composes all of his works using a typewriter. The revision process is fascinating for him and one he laboriously proceeds through with each literary piece.
West and his novel The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg figure prominently in a chapter in Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee's book Elizabeth Costello. Coetzee's title character is so disturbed by the horrors West describes in his book that she questions, in a lecture given at a conference in Amsterdam on evil, whether a writer can immerse themselves in such darkness without suffering some sort of personal harm. West, unbeknown to Costello until only hours before her very pointed lecture, is also attending the conference.
Read more about this topic: Paul West (writer)
Famous quotes containing the word analysis:
“Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)
“... the big courageous acts of life are those one never hears of and only suspects from having been through like experience. It takes real courage to do battle in the unspectacular task. We always listen for the applause of our co-workers. He is courageous who plods on, unlettered and unknown.... In the last analysis it is this courage, developing between man and his limitations, that brings success.”
—Alice Foote MacDougall (1867–1945)
“Ask anyone committed to Marxist analysis how many angels on the head of a pin, and you will be asked in return to never mind the angels, tell me who controls the production of pins.”
—Joan Didion (b. 1934)