A Small Flaubertian Moment: A Review of Julian Barnes’ Something to Declare Barnes’ latest work, Something to Declare is non-fiction, a series of eighteen essays collected over twenty years, covering a range of (mainly gallic) subjects from Richard Cobb’s love and disappointment…
Tag: fiction
A review of Elizabeth Jolley’s An Innocent Gentleman
Is this Nothing: Elizabeth Jolley’s An Innocent Gentleman As a comedy of manners, An Innocent Gentleman makes for a mildly humorous, and easy to read novel; a brief play which is a kind of light farce. As a commentary on…
A Review of Alice Munro’s Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
And there is much in Munro about temporary victories, a sensitive adjustment to the fact that facts, although facts, are not necessarily the last answer. Munro uses her own experiences as child and young woman. In this world her mother…
A Review of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being
In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a book of moderate length, Kundera provides a richness of content out of all proportion to its length. He achieves this by a use of narrative loops. These loops cover areas that are approximately the same…
A Review of Banana Yoshimoto’s Asleep
A Small Resurrection: A Review of Banana Yoshimoto’s Asleep The combination of very realistic, interesting, and believable characters, with a hint of supernatural epiphany which turns the ordinary into something magic and extraordinary, is very powerful. With delicate strokes of…
A Review of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections
The style is edged in irony as one might expect with such a subject but there are few quotable passages. Franzen is more concerned with the production of a seamless narrative. Although there are no solecisms, a few sentences are…
A Review of Isabel Allende’s Portrait in Sepia
Portrait in Sepia is a very easy to read, well researched, straightforward narrative, which is interesting for its historical context, and perhaps relaxing, albeit devoid of serious philosophical depths, real characterisation, or linguistic innovation. Reviewed by Magdalena Ball Portrait in Sepia…
A Review of Hooking Up by Tom Wolfe
Despite the occasional whine, the self-aggrandisement which is rampant throughout the essays, some of which read like a prelude to an autobiography which must surely be in the works, Hooking Up is a worthwhile read, if only for the genius which comes…
A review of Max Sollitt’s The Correspondence Course
How do we define good writing? Are there clear boundaries between writing genres, fact and fiction, history and theory, writing and criticism? These are some of the questions raised by Max Sollitt’s first novel The Correspondence Course, which defies its own definition…
A review of Karen Sedaitis’ Soul Dark Soil
Humus-rich Food for the Soul: Karen Sedaitis’ Soul Dark Soil Sedaitis’ work gets under the reader’s skin; goes deeper than the details of her stories, and even when she is describing something ugly, like dismemberment, rot, abduction, physical, or emotional…