James Wood
speaker
815 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 15 Sep
James Wood’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And before we start getting into the book itself, and I I I I i it's it's it's so funny and so rich.
And so weird in some ways that I think we're going to have a lot of fun discussing it.
I just wanted to for our listeners to sort of link it, to situate it a little bit in this series that began with Madame Bovary and that is called Who's Afraid of Realism?
Last month we we discussed Saul Bellow's novella Seize the
Day, which was published actually only a year before uh Panin.
And I think I said um at the time that I was describing some of Bellow's marvellous um descriptions and noticings, I said, actually these are the sorts of things that that Nabokov would have loved if Nabokov could have ever brought himself to respect uh Saul Bellow, but he was too competitive in his Nabuccovian way and couldn't.
But I just want to
Alert listeners to this rather delicious coincidence, um, that we have effectively these two great Russian notices.
Bello was almost born in in St.
Petersburg, in fact, but his family emigrated to Canada before he before he was born could have been born in Russia, though he had siblings who were.
We have these two Russian um notices, estr greater strangers, and great twentieth century stylists.
The differences being perhaps we'll just lay them out very quickly, um, that Bello's novel firmly belongs to a sort of post-war, almost default kind of a mid-century American realism.
And
Penin doesn't.
Penin is narrated by an unreliable narrator.
Um it's in some ways therefore written in an unreliable style, which is a fascinating thing that we'll I hope we'll come to.
Um
it has a sort of unreliable epistemology.
If the narrator who is who says he's a great friend of Penin's turns out not to be a great friend of of Panin, and also turns out actually to have a poor memory, and is called by Penin himself a dreadful inventor, then it's not clear exactly who this Panin is.
And the final thing to say
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