The novel is easy to read and moves quickly, effortlessly creating that fictive dream that makes for a pleasurable reading experience, but this is anything but a lighthearted read. The complexities of parenting, the shifting trends of the art world, the struggle to balance self-actualisation and artistic fulfilment with responsibility and love, the way we create and define ourselves, and the relationship between the interior world and the exterior one are all covered with great subtlety and depth.
Category: Literary Fiction Reviews
A review of Good Americans Go to Paris When They Die by Howard Waldman
There’s a spare loveliness to Waldman’s prose, infused as it is with loneliness, humour, and a deep sense of irony in the cyclical prison of our nostalgia for the past. Good Americans Go To Paris When They Die manages a delicate, and all too rare, balancing act between entertainment and introspection.
A review The Man Who made Vermeers: Unvarnishing the Legend of Master Forger Han van Meegeren by Jonathan Lopez
There’s a spare loveliness to Waldman’s prose, infused as it is with loneliness, humour, and a deep sense of irony in the cyclical prison of our nostalgia for the past. Good Americans Go To Paris When They Die manages a delicate, and all too rare, balancing act between entertainment and introspection.
A review of God of Speed by Luke Davies
Though Davies’ Hughes isn’t exactly a likable character, the intimacy is so striking and the intensity of the portrait so great that Hughes becomes someone entirely familiar. Not so much the grand aviator with all the superlatives of his status: richest, fastest, most inventive, but instead, a man like any other, pursued by demons and running hard to find a way to live through them.
A review of The New Angel by Ali Alizadeh
Bahram’s is the voice of the newly-arrived immigrant, misunderstood and always alien, at home neither in the country he has come from nor the one he now inhabits. Such people are becoming increasingly common in our globalised society, and their outsider voices need to be heard and heeded if the notion of a ‘global village’ is to ever become a reality.
A review of Tumbuktu by Paul Auster
The overriding desire for meaning beyond this short life is one which infuses the book, but Auster never allows a human narrative voice to interfere with Mr Bones’ perspective. Clever, funny, lighthearted and serious all at the same time, this is a stylistic departure for Paul Auster which nonetheless makes full use of his gifts.
A review of Can You Forgive Her by Anthony Trollope
It is the first book in the Palliser series, so that if you want to tackle this one of Trollope’s two novel-sets, you should start here. And it is a probing and sensitive study of a woman struggling to find her own way, in a society where this was really unheard of, and where it took much more of a battle than it would today.
A review of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
There are stereotypes where I wouldn’t have expected them (the strong, fierce, scarred mother Belicia, for example, whose interior life is scarcely present). It is action-packed and invigorating. For a first novel, it contains remarkable writing and invention, but there is plenty of room for development and maturation in his subsequent work.
A review of Be Near Me by Andrew O’Hagan
And Be Near Me is exquisitely written and this in itself prompts another question. Can a book that is exquisitely written condescend to bother with plot, characterization, and, quite simply, the dirty work of novelistic labor?
A review of Beginner’s Greek by James Collins
The problem is that there’s not much substance to this novel. If all you want is entertainment, then this will provide it. It is competently written, but uneven; character development is in need of work. And there is too much manipulation of the reader.