Justin Taylor—

Over at The Nation, Scott Saul makes the case for Eliot Weinberger’s new collection of essays.

The pieces in Oranges and Peanuts for Sale cover a wide range of topics–the arts under the Bush administration, Obama’s presidential campaign, ancient and contemporary Chinese poetry, the color blue, exoticism, the relationship between Samuel Beckett and Octavio Paz–but are knit together by a sensibility that prizes exactitude in its formulations yet is open to the unpredictable complications of the larger world. Put another way: weak prose and parochialism are two of Weinberger’s chief enemies. One of the delights of reading his essays is that they reveal the interconnections between the two; the Wittgensteinian idea that the limits of one’s language are the limits of one’s world becomes, in his hands, a tool for revealing the blind spots common to our culture.

I’m sold.