I’m not sure why it is better for the author to spoil the plot, than for some purported friend of the reader to do the same! But — if I may be permitted to issue a meta-spoiler, or a spoiler about spoilers — there is no need to worry that Trollope is going to go off the deep end in this respect. You will still find suspense a-plenty.
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A review of The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
Dawkins is such a clear thinking scientist that he manages, through analogy, metaphor, logical argument, and example to make his points with the kind of clarity that religious theologians rarely reach. This book is a joy to read, and never gets dry or terse. Instead Dawkins’ good humour and sense of humanistic pleasure in science and discovery are constantly evident.
A review of The Paris Review Interviews, volume 1
Overall, Gourevitch’s hope that these interviews will stand “if not as definitive portraits of each artist, then as a significant contribution to such an ultimate portrait, with the added fascination that they are in large measure self-portraits” has been, on my reading, largely fulfilled.
A review of Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco
Eco sustains his fantasy with the skill of a gifted writer, but sometimes he resembles the woman who thinks that she can make it on just sex appeal. The studied pose of a gifted writer can slip and leave great empty places exposed. He will carry you forward with more skill than in his other works, and, magician-like, induce you to read the whole of a long, long book, but the final pages miss the target and he – and his reader – has to content himself with a gestures rather than reality.
A review of All Will Be Revealed by Robert Anthony Siegel
The transformation of both Augustus and Verena forms the stuff of which All Will Be Revealed is made. Siegel is incredibly gifted in narrative ability and speed. His instinct for characterization is flawless and economical. He makes as much and as well of his minor as of his major characters. His performance is deft and sure.
I Dream for You: Meshell Ndegeocello, Bitter
Meshell Ndegeocello is, to me, an interesting, neglected, and valuable talent. She spoke once of being surprised that her record company saw her as a failure. I am surprised by her surprise: we live in a world in which to be an artist or an intellectual is not the expected thing for a black person (rather one is expected to be too distracted by the fantasy of race and the rigors of reality for creative, independent endeavors). If you do not pull or push a plow, work for the post office, or stand in a pulpit telling pretty lies to women with their bibles and sometimes legs open, you have no ordinary purpose, no ordinary role.
Head Full of Paradise: Robyn Hitchcock’s Ole! Tarantula
Eccentricity is one of those facts, one of those strategies, that one appreciates most if there is some sense of reality as contrast: all eccentricity, all fantasy, can render a subject, or a man, merely irrelevant. On some songs, such as the title song “Olé! Tarantula,” Robyn Hitchcock might be offering clues as to how he himself might be seen: he sings, “I feel like a three-legged chinchilla” and “looking at his fingers caressing the keys, if he don’t please you, then you just can’t be pleased.”
The Gates of Hell Swinging Open: Mark Eitzel, 60 Watt Silver Lining
Mark Eitzel’s voice is broad and deep without being loud, and his intonation is sensitive. “The view from the cliffs must have been exciting, and up to the peaks you were bound. Now you’re stranded alone, and the past is unknown, and there is no easy way down,” he sings, substituting “past” for “path,” before continuing: and the song captures aspiration, struggle, and spiritual reversal.
A review of On Opera by Bernard Williams
This book will contribute something to your knowledge of opera but it will not be easy to read. The awkwardness of Williams’s English makes the book unpleasant. It baffles me that a man who obviously had such a love for music could have written so unmusically.
A review of The Aeneid by Virgil
I am not a Latinist but I have over the years immersed myself in Latin texts and have a little knowledge of the problems that Fagles faced. Virgil began The Aeneid in the most striking way he could manage and a line or two from near the opening becomes eminently suitable for comparison of the original with Fagles’s translation.