Pratchett shows his usual flair – wonderfully Dickensian – for names. Lipwig’s girlfriend, a very abrasive young woman, is Adora Belle Dearheart. And the fun gathers in the last quarter of the book to reward the persistence of the reader.
Category: Literary Fiction Reviews
A review of Long Afternoon of the World by Graeme Kinross-Smith
The photographs become everyone’s close people. The times and places become our own memories of what we’ve known, and been and where we’ve ended. It is, indeed, a long afternoon – and at the end of it is evening. Though this isn’t a fast novel to read, nor does it leave the reader with a denouement in any sense. Yet it is both beautiful, and powerful in its ability to draw out, like a great poem, the core meaning of a moment.
A review of lettre a d. histoire d’un amour by André Gorz
It really is a lovely, warm piece, and a weepy one for knowing the end of their story. I was relieved that the plan to end of their lives together was not chronicled here, because I became somewhat enamoured of both of them, and of the love they shared.
A review of Dark Paradise by Rosa Liksom
To come to a judgment: the pieces in Dark Paradise hit home more often than not, and the way in which an overarchingly oppressive mood is sustained frequently impresses.
A review of A Mirror in the Road by Morris Dickstein
If you chart Dickstein’s emphases as a line graph, you will find that it spikes sharply upward at certain authors. Although he sees Joyce, Mann, and Kafka as the dominant modernists, he writes relatively little about the first two compared to what he writes about Kafka. Joyce is too knotty a problem to be dealt with in a book that has many other considerations.
A review of Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You by Peter Cameron
In some ways it is like a very interesting first installment to a longer story. Although this disappoints one’s conventional longings for a neat fictional package, it is on more sophisticated grounds eminently satisfactory. This, the eighth book by Cameron, is an accomplishment that provides an irresistible blend of the moving and the witty.
A review of The River Baptists by Belinda Castles
Castles creates mood skilfully, as in the opening chapter where Danny and his father are fishing in their little boat. The blood on his father’s t-shirt from the worms and other creatures is symbolic of the man and his relationship with his family. The details of the community and the people who live there produce a sleepiness that is tinged with menace. There is much that moves under the surface of the water, occasionally bursting out to wreck havoc.
A review of The Great Big Show by Justin Lowe
It’s as if the characters function as a kind of strophe and antistrophe — the male voices pressing on with the war and the females analysing, wondering, and in their own way, pulling back even as they participate. The tension between these dispersed voices drives the narrative forward and helps give the story a drama which goes beyond the action on the battlefield.
A review of The Illustrated Life of Pi by Yann Martel
It would be unlikely that you do not have a copy of Life of Pi already. The new edition is such a happy event that you should give your copy away and replace it with this one.
A review of Sybarite Among the Shadows by Richard McNeff
This is an unusual and intriguing novel and an entertaining foray into an earlier, stranger England. There are plenty of puns and amusing similes to smoothly move matters along (“The waiter was hovering over them with the forlorn air of the last penguin in the colony” is one) and Richard McNeff’s prose often gives sybaritic pleasure.