Conversations between friends are always inspiring and stimulating. Anyone who shared this experience will know the impact of such relationship on their work. Interestingly ‘The Company They Kept’ edited by Robert B. Silvers & Barbara Epstein is a good book which brings that meaningful friendship to light with a collection of twenty-eight essays.
It is a book on writers and their unforgettable friendships and also a book for people who want to see another angle to the writer, poet or an intellectual.
Often friendships are valued after death and death can be a source to push writers to an account about their memories with their friends. In this book, it is interesting to read how the death of their contemporaries and friends made most of the writers revisit their first meeting with the departed. They rethink and give and explain the meaning of their friendship as Anna Akhmatova writes about Amedeo Modigliani.
“Probably, we both did not understand one important thing: everything that happened was for both of us a prehistory of our future lives: his very short one, my very long one. The breathing of art still had not charred or transformed the two existences; this must have been the light, radiant hour before dawn.”
‘The Company They Kept’ is a heartwarming book for friend’s bookshelf. It is an extraordinarily moving, dazzling and striking book in which friendship is valued and never forgotten.
Copyright Semra Eren Nijhar – All rights reserved
Semra Eren-Nijhar 
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