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George Steiner. Errata: An Examined Life. New Haven, Ct. Yale University Press. 1998. 206 pages. $25. ISBN 0-30007503-0.
For George Steiner, examining a life is not the same as telling it. A life lived most fully does not here become a series of dates, places, conversations, and letters. Instead, Errata allows Steiner to return to the occasions of his most persistent themes, thus to return to the themes themselves.
As in Language and Silence and In Bluebeard's Castle, the power of Errata builds less from a thesis structure, block by block, than from essay excursions, missions into and around a subject. One is caught up in a process of thinking and writing. In that process, words begin to take on a voice. Like Montaigne's, Steiner's voice...