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.
Looks Nothing Like Jesus: The Killers’ Sam’s Town
Light percussion, then a speeding beat and swirling music, then tiny techno beats, followed by heavier drumming and a voice and lyric lines about the inertia of others and the singer’s sense of his own energy and destiny begin the…
Images of Women: Beyonce’s B’Day
Beyonce, like Diana Ross before her, knows of the many women performers who have preceded her own arrival on the public stage, and has offered compliments to them: and Beyonce is trying to place herself in a flattering locale within that tradition and that ambition involves manners and methods dangerous, enriching, exciting, and easy to misunderstand.
Masculine, Nurturing: Ben Harper’s Both Sides of the Gun
In a song co-written with Danny Kalb, “More Than Sorry,” Ben Harper sings “Goodbye hasn’t been so good to me” and “We all think that we’re right” and “Too many people say goodbye before they say hello,” and concludes, “What…
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…