Silent Conversations

‘Anthony Rudolf is an intense reader and writer: his opinions are dogmatically personal and revealing and reflect the extensiveness of his library.’ —World Literature Today

‘Silent Conversations should not be read “at one sitting” but returned to and weighted over time. Even its sections tagged by names too obscure to recall hold provocative insights.’ —Jewish Chronicle

‘As well as being a significant addition to the study of literature, Silent Conversations offers a vivid glimpse of a variety of literary and artistic connections and an insight into the London-based Jewish sensibility of the post-Holocaust era.’ —Jewish Quarterly

‘Rudolf knows how to build with subtlety and complexity upon the rhythms of conversational speech.’ —Andrew S. Taylor, American Book Review

‘Silent Conversations seemingly lists all the books Rudolf has ever taken to bed (and even some he has not). Rarely has the ruinous eroticism of reading been evoked with such devotion [. . .] He regales us with vital episodes from his life as a translator from the French [. . .] For anyone seeking to gain an appreciation of cultural relations in late twentieth-century London and Paris, his modular memoir will be the admission ticket.’ —Times Literary Supplement

‘Compulsively readable, erudite and alive, Rudolf’s prose here displays the virtues that have impressed this particular reader on previous occasions, albeit in much smaller and more focused books [. . .] Rudolf has spent a life gathering ideas and images from his reading like pebbles from a beach. Silent Conversations: A Reader’s Life contains many of these resplendent stones, each of them held up to the light of perception, each carefully and perceptively illuminated.’ —Eric Hoffman, Jacket2