On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain

A short collection of essays, on music (mainly) and literature, published posthumously.If you're looking for a short collection of essays on music and literature I'm sure it's pretty good, but if you're looking for a careful, structured argument on late style you may be disappointed.

a wonderful book that covers literature music and film.....a great writer who tackles culture in a learned way!!!

fascinating.

Edward Said's writings never aim to make the obvious observation but instead seek to discover underlying strands of ideas that buoy up the work at hand and reveal subterranean layers of meaning. When he accomplishes this, his writings brim with the enthusiasm of a new discovery or the pleasure of understanding a familiar work in an unfamiliar way.The cost to the reader not infrequently consists of wading through thickets of inpenetrable prose, prose that needs be hacked at to decipher the meaning intended. This necessity may be exacerbated in this collection by the fact that it was left unfinished and unpolished at his death. Nonetheless, skill in reading Theory and the jargon that attends it is required to comprehend, not to say appreciate, much of the early chapters. Happily much of this falls away as the book proceeds and many pearls are revealed undisguised and in fascinating verbal settings.I continued to have difficulties with much of the entire enterprise: to wit, are Mozart's late operas really "late style" considering the man died so young? Surely they became "late style" by way of premature mortality alone. Extrapolating late style from one book wonders such as Di Lampedusa also stretches the point.And yet incomplete, impenetrable and, as always, arguable Said, paradoxical as it sounds, remains more intellectually stimulating than most comparable critics, and still repays the effort it takes to read him.