But it is when de Valle brings death itself directly into the story that his prose really shines. The complex relationship between life and death are the centre of action in “Two slices of blue”, a story about a child who is given back his eyesight from a donor’s corneas. The tightness of the narrative is superbly handled as de Valle moves back and forth between the moment of death/damage, a wife’s realisation that she’s lost her husband, and a parent’s experience of their child’s accident and subsequent operation.
Category: Book Reviews
Book Reviews
A Review of Coraline by Neil Gaiman
The whole tone is a bit Alice in Wonderland like, and even has a talking cat, silly songs, cryptic messages, characters that metamorphosis, and the kind of almost surreal play between waking and dreaming, life and death, shadow and light which made…
A Review of French Spirits by Jeffrey Greene
French Spirits begins with the earth’s axis tilting away from the sun and sliding “down into the narrow pit of gray winter months” and ends in the Burgundian winter mists, the warmth of life and human celebration contrasting with the eternal…
A Review of Timepieces by Drusilla Modjeska
For readers not intimately familiar with Modjeska’s work, Australian art and literature, or interested in the problems of creating a work of art/literature as an artist/writer, the book will be hard to identify with and overly intellectual. Nevertheless, the essays…
A Review of Liam’s Going by Michael Joyce
So often novels have style but little substance and often there is a struggle to express substance but the project is doomed without style. Here is a book with both in abundance and a sense of poetry that illumines both…
A Review of Dreaming Water by Gail Tsukiyama
At times the narrative was almost too pretty for its subject – too sentimental. As a reader, I wanted more anger, more pain, more depths into Hana and Cate at least. They are both so good, so radiant, even when…
A Review of J M Coetzee’s Disgrace
David Lurie is a man who has, at fifty two, sorted his life and his sexuality out nicely. He has a tidy job teaching poetry at the Technical University of Cape Town, a once a week visit to a discrete…
A Review of Spice Notes by Ian Hemphill
Hemphill knows his stuff. He grew up on a herb and spice farm and has been involved in growing, using, packaging and marketing herbs and spices for most of his life, hence the nickname “Herbie” which has been with him…
A Review of The Self-Publishing Manual by Dan Poynter
A Review of The Self-Publishing Manual by Dan Poynter Overall, this is a very useful guide, and if it errs on the side of Poynter’s considerable enthusiasm and confidence in the face of what is a fairly daunting task for…
A Review of Hindustan Contessa by Jane Watson
Part of the tension in the book is created by the fact that we glimpse all of the action through Tillie’s diary – a kind of mini-summation first person narrative. The different threads of the story are revealed separately in…