November 5, 2008

John Leonard (February 25, 1939 to November 5, 2008) was an American writer, a  critic,whose focus included various cultural manifestations. He became executive editor of the Times Book Review in 1971.

Reading for My Life: Writings, 1958-2008 (2012) is a posthumous collection, and here we read about the  novel, A flag for sunrise by Robert Stone (1992). John Leonard writes--

The heresy here is Gnostic and Manichean. There is a "divine spark" and a "library in a jar". Culture and love are both secret. The demiurge is a tourist. ... In the absence of evil --to an anthropologist nothing is evil, including himself, we have history: snakes, feathers, lizards, jewels, a fanged cat, a wooden cross, a unicorn, and death without mercy.

Mr. Stone kicks the brain around; we live in heresy; Satan prevails; A Flag for Sunrise is the best novel of ideas I've read since Dostoevsky escaped from Omsk.

John Leonard also wrote:

In the cellars of the night, when the mind starts moving around old trunks of bad times, the pain of this and the shame of that, the memory of a small boldness is a hand to hold.