{"id":29462,"date":"2022-01-17T13:27:13","date_gmt":"2022-01-17T17:27:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/?p=29462"},"modified":"2022-01-18T13:38:40","modified_gmt":"2022-01-18T17:38:40","slug":"arthur-krystal-whats-the-deal-hummingbird","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/2022\/01\/17\/arthur-krystal-whats-the-deal-hummingbird\/","title":{"rendered":"Arthur Krystal: “What’s the Deal, Hummingbird?”"},"content":{"rendered":"

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“What’s the Deal, Hummingbird?”<\/strong><\/span>
\nby Arthur Krystal<\/span>
\nfrom the January 24, 2022 issue of\u00a0The New Yorker<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

[\/fusion_title][fusion_text]<\/p>\n

\"\"[fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″ text_color=””]F[\/fusion_dropcap]or a couple of decades, Arthur Krystal has been a critic and essayist, with many pieces showing up in Harper’s<\/em>, The New York Times Book Review<\/em>, the Times Literary Supplement<\/em>, and The New Yorker<\/em>, among others. He has published Agitations: Essays on Life and Literature<\/em> (2002), The Half-Life of an American Essayist<\/em> (2007), Except When I Write: Reflections of a Recovering Critic<\/em> (2011) and This Thing We Call Literature<\/em> (2016).\u00a0I think this is the first time any of his fiction has shown up in The New Yorker<\/em>. I don’t know his work at all, but I like the way “What’s the Deal, Hummingbird?” starts and look forward to finishing it:<\/p>\n

On or around May 5th of 2020, he just stopped. He stopped exercising, stopped walking, stopped reading, stopped planning. He ate, drank, washed, and paid the bills, but that was it. He was seventy-three. He\u2019d spent more than 38,368,800 minutes on earth, only a precious few of which he remembered. That\u2019s what hit him one evening, after the cheering and clanking of pots and pans had died down: a vast chunk of his life\u2014the greater part of his life\u2014might as well never have occurred. Not just the time spent sleeping but those millions of minutes spanning lunches, dinners, meetings, concerts, marriage, work, books, movies, conversations\u2014all gone. What remained? A bird\u2019s breath of his existence.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Have you read anything by Krystal? What do you think of this story. I would love to hear what you have to say in the comments below.<\/p>\n

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