Wright excels at the exploration of popular culture. He writes well of comix, jazz, and the media. He is still enough of a hippy to deplore the world’s sad path to a reactionary and repressive right. He is not only…
Category: Book Reviews
Book Reviews
A review of The Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster
As Nathan’s own book of follies grows in an almost Rabelasian style, there are botched attempts at love and lust, outrageous names like “Marina Luisa Sanchez Gonzalez”, a physical and metaphysical quest towards a fictional construct called the “Hotel Existence”,…
A review of Zigzag through the Bitter-Orange Trees by Ersi Sotiropoulos
Sotiropoulos draws her minor characters sharply. The staff of the hospital with its charismatic Dr. Kalotychos, the nursing staff, and the patients – described unsympathetically but realistically as monsters – constitutes the closed, stifling world of the ill and their…
A review of Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman
But many of these pieces are in fact exceptionally good and the poetry, although Gaiman makes rather little of his poetry, is very good. He forthrightly asserts that it is meant to be read aloud and he measures its quality…
A review of Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford, edited by Peter Y. Sussman
The funeral industry played into her hands beautifully through the inability of its spokesmen to keep their mouths shut. Each outburst of strained rhetoric from these provided Decca with endless material for subsequent articles in the most widely read magazines…
A review of The Way It Wasn’t by James Laughlin
The cover is a beauty with an autographed picture of the author and the title in typescript below it. The inside matches the outside and consists of a generous selection of appropriate or simply beautiful photographs and artwork. It is…
A review of The Unknown Terrorist by Richard Flanagan
The Unknown Terrorist is being sold as a Trojan Horse of a thriller masquerading the seriousness of the societal critique it provides, but even that statement is a Trojan Horse. At the core of this novel is a nihilism so bleak, that it makes even the horror of the terrorist act, of murder and suicide, seem minor in comparison. It’s almost the complete opposite of the joyous affirmative humour which underpins Gould’s Book of Fish, and except for the occasional forays into stunning prose, it’s hard to believe this is the same author.
A review of Measuring the World by Daniel Kehlmann
I think of German writers – unlike Musil or Joseph Roth, both of Austria – as hard and gnarly with long involved sentences and a gloomy outlook. Kehlmann’s lightness of touch is exceptional. He is a quietly witty writer with…
A review of Everybody Loves Somebody by Joanna Scott
Scott has written a splendid book. It’s clever, fairly glitters with cleverness, but it also better than that, and is a book that will appeal to every perceptive reader. Reviewed by Bob Williams Everybody Loves Somebody by Joanna Scott Back…
A review of Decreation by Anne Carson
But it is the close interconnections in the book (after another section of relatively autonomous poems) that pose major fascinations for the reader as she makes connections of times and places, bringing together in harmony ideas and persons that are…