Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin “Two and two doesn’t necessarily get you the truth. Two and two equals a voice outside the window. Two and two equals the wind. The living bird is not its labelled bones.” (484) Mathematical reality…
Category: Book Reviews
Book Reviews
Stendahl’s Charterhouse of Parma: A Review
Charterhouse of Parma (published 1839) is set in Italy, but this is in the early 19th century, before Italy became “Italy”. While a country such as France, with its late-18th-century Revolution, had of course much nationalistic feeling and was a political entity, Italy still retained the medieval character of a host of tiny “principalities” (an area ruled by a Prince) and such. Parma, in northern “Italy”, was one of these mini-countries. When we first meet the Prince of Parma, Stendhal draws a portrait of … well, not what you would expect of royalty.
A review of Hanif Kureishi’s Gabriel’s Gift
Gabriel’s Gift follows a few months in the life of Gabriel Bunch, a fifteen year old North London schoolboy in search of his muse. Gabriel’s parents have recently split up, and his father, once the bass player for 70s rock…
Anne Tyler, a Nineteenth Century Contemporary
Tyler has brought exceptional skill and variety to an unaccustomed area of literary activity, the world of the best-seller. Her combination of popularity and quality recalls the great novelists of another century. Erudite guest reviewer Bob Williams looks at Tyler’s…
A review of Moses Isegawa’s Abyssinian Chronicles
A boy is raised in the land of despots, where the “curried curses of dispossessed property owners” is not necessary to explode into murderous excess. Between his abusive and tyrannical parents, and the abusive and tyrannical dictator Idi Amin, who…
A review of Matthew Kneale’s English Passengers
In 1857, Captain Illiam Quillian Kewley decides to take his boat, the Sincerity, on a little jaunt from the Isle of Mann, to Maldon. Perhaps he wasn’t really selling salted Herring. However, his little voyage turns into something entirely different,…
A review of Elizabeth Routen’s Voices on the Stair: Collected Stories
There are stories about war, about those who just don’t fit into society, about the US South, and the dissolution of marriage, of life, its limitations and occasional tender beauty. There are unattractive waitresses, fat men, poseurs, blind men, mothers,…
A Review of Philip Johnson’s e’cco 2
If you casually flip through this book in a shop, you may well be tempted to leave it alone for fear that the dishes are too fancy and fussy for your tastes. That would be a mistake. This is food…
A review of David Malouf’s Dream Stuff
A missing father, a missing uncle, a missing place. David Malouf’s latest book of short stories, Dream Stuff is about longing and nostalgia. A desire to reach across the bridge of time, back to some place which may have never…
A review of Anita Desai’s Diamond Dust
ndividually, the stories in Diamond Dust traverse a wide geographic terrain, moving from the Himalayas to Manitoba, Toronto, Cornwall, Amherst, Massachusetts, Mexico, and Delhi, but throughout the stories there are similarities in the characters, and in the theme; that of…