The “weak novel” has been with us for a long time. The weak novel is ubiquitous. Indeed, it is possible that no novel exists without its allegedly weak(er) cousins and that no novel is without its own moments of weakness. In this reading, weakness is not a bad thing. Rather, weakness, specifically literary weakness, is enlivening, challenging, and generally has the effect of compelling the reader to move, as we say, outside their comfort zone. Weak novels cause us to attend to fiction as strategy rather than as entertainment. Tristram Shandy is a weak novel. It is a novel that only weakly consents to participate in the conventions of genre, that is always about to—and sometimes does—fail to be a novel at all. This is, I want to show, an important quality for a literary work to have—the quality of weak identification, or even total disidentification, with its own type or genre. This effort, rather than being destined for failure, is in fact fundamental for the flourishing of the novel form.
In an experiment that ticks most of the mystery boxes in modern physics, a group of researchers announced on Wednesday that they had simulated a pair of black holes in a quantum computer and sent a message between them through a shortcut in space-time called a wormhole.
Physicists described the achievement as another small step in the effort to understand the relation between gravity, which shapes the universe, and quantum mechanics, which governs the subatomic realm of particles.
There are cheeses with fuzzy rinds such as Camembert, and ones marbled with blue veins such as Cabrales, which ripens for months in mountain caves in northern Spain.
Yet almost all of the world’s thousand-odd kinds of cheese start the same, as a white, rubbery lump of curd.
How do we get from that uniform blandness to this cornucopia? The answer revolves around microbes. Cheese teems with bacteria, yeasts and molds. “More than 100 different microbial species can easily be found in a single cheese type,” says Baltasar Mayo, a senior researcher at the Dairy Research Institute of Asturias in Spain. In other words: Cheese isn’t just a snack, it’s an ecosystem. Every slice contains billions of microbes — and they are what makes cheeses distinctive and delicious.
Among the high-rise apartment blocks of Vaise, one of Lyon's newer quartiers (districts), I stepped into a little restaurant where time seemed to have stood still for 100 years. From the outside, Les 4G, a Lyonnais bouchon (traditional restaurant), looked much like the nondescript cafe-cum-tobacco shops that can be found in most small French towns, but inside the decor was as warm and inviting as a country pub. The red gingham tablecloths matched the chequered napkins, which were neatly stored in shelving units along the wall with brass plaques indicating each owner's name – regular clientele who had their own napkin stored for them.
As I sat down, sandwiched between jolly retirees Pierre-Loïc Delfante and Jean Paul Pillon, I realised that I was the youngest in the group by more than 30 years. The cheese delivery had just arrived, and the chef was unpacking brown paper bags containing soft balls of cervelle de canut, an unappetising name that translates as "silk workers' brain" but looks like cottage cheese. Delfante filled my glass with a crisp white wine from Beaujolais. It was 9:00 in the morning.
I remember you, baguette. I made thousands of you.
That’s one of the nice things about being a baker (which I was, for a few glorious years): You’re as ancient as Egypt, but you’re also Andy Warhol in an apron, mass-producing your art object. Baguettes in glowing dozens, repeating editions and series of baguettes, out of the great oven and onto the metal rack. How do they look? How do they sound? A field of grain right before the harvest will give off an audible creak or tick of readiness, as the loaded stalks gently grate against one another. At the other end of the process, the cooling baguettes sit on the rack and crackle with contentment. With completion.
Smiley re-creates a world in which women — whether wives, daughters or prostitutes — are coerced, their movements constricted, their opinions dismissed, their very existence under threat. In this respect “A Dangerous Business” achieves the goal of all worthy historical novels: opening a window to the past, forcing comparisons to the present, raising unsettling questions about how much has really changed.
“So how was it all, this 80-year-old-life?” he asks himself in a letter to his brother, toward the end of the book. “A total porridge really, with love of family the one abiding, triumphant discovery.” Genuine as it evidently was, that love of family masks a jumble of paradoxes. Declarations of enduring love for his wife, Jane, stand alongside confessions of multiple infidelities. But nobody would expect the creator of George Smiley — the master spy in the body of a bank manager — to be straightforward. Indeed, those of us for whom his work has been a lifelong source of complicated pleasure wouldn’t have it any other way.