This is not a book that develops logically. It cares nothing about loose ends or impossibilities. There is another world that lurks behind and around the world we know and Murakami is disquietingly comfortable in both.
Tag: fiction
A review of The Suitors by Ben Ehrenreich
This is an amazing and a gripping novel told with virtuosity. His ability to retell that earliest of books is a splendor that constitutes an act of magic seldom matched in the literature of our time. You will do yourself an injury to miss this book.
A review of Mr. Weston’s Good Wine by T. F. Powys
Mr. Weston’s Good Wine is a wayward work. It is religious, carnal, heretical, humorous and engaging, digressive and ultimately involving. It has a complex, personal symbolism that is not reducible to any simple message. T. F. Powys’ work as a whole seems to represent one of the most rewarding byways in English literature.
A review of North River by Pete Hamill
Hamill does a stunning job in his depiction of both sophisticated and popular Irish and Italian cultures of the time. This is an absorbing novel of the old-fashioned kind with plot complexities and well-drawn characters. It will entertain and leave the reader with durably pleasant memories.
A review of Ripley Under Water by Patricia Highsmith
Some time ago, I read an interview with Norman Mailer where he made the claim that staring at Cubist paintings was good for his eyesight. I forget Mailer’s argument, but I’d make a similar claim regarding Patricia Highsmith: her novels can sooth your nerves. If you are entering a troubling period in your life, read Highsmith.
A review of Amok and Other Stories by Stefan Zweig
Anthea Bell’s translation reads extremely well. She has given us an elaborate, sophisticated English prose that brings out all of Zweig’s literary art and emotional subtlety. Overall, Amok and Other Stories represents a splendid selection of Stefan Zweig’s short fiction, with the added frisson that these stories share a correspondence with the writer’s own tragic fate.
A review of Another by Joel Deane
The community of Another is a bleak one to be sure—a distopia which is all too real. Death is everywhere, and those that hurt you most are those who should be protecting you. The community is empty and disfunctional, and everyone we meet is poor, damaged, and full of ugly pain and scars. It isn’t pretty, but somehow Deane’s exquisite writing contains beauty that transcends its setting, and hope which goes beyond the unhappy ending.
A review of American Youth by Phil LaMarche
American Youth is a perfectly rendered novel which manages that difficult balance between absolute topicality—this is a novel for our times—and timeless beauty. This is both a classic piece of literature and an important chronicle of a generation desperate to get out of a downward spiral.
A review of Nights in the Asylum by Carol Lefevre
I believe this is an important Australian novel which addresses the contemporary dilemma of the asylum seeker. The novel comes at a time when the refugee issue is transforming from one of a (frustrating, on my part) general apathy towards ‘queue-jumpers’ around the time of the SIEVX to a burgeoning collective empathy (perhaps guilt) towards refugees genuinely seeking asylum in this country.
A review of The Sonnet Lover by Carol Goodman
The Sonnet Lover is tightly plotted and skilfully executed, and would appeal particularly to lovers of literary sleuthing and academic intrigue, courtly poetry, Shakespeare’s sonnets, Venice and Florence, and readers familiar with the political wranglings that go on behind closed doors in universities.