Take a Breath & Hold It is a book which doesn’t flinch from life’s blackest, most feared experiences. It faces them head-on, and there are no euphemisms. Death, insanity, jealousy and fear are ever present, in every story, as in every life, and they feel as bad as always. But along with all of that, and even at its lowest ebb, there is still beauty everywhere in this collection.
Tag: fiction
A review of Landing by Emma Donoghue
The description of modern Dublin is good and it is a pleasure to read an author who is not afraid to take us to Stonybatter or Trinity as naturally as an American novelist would take us to Halstead Street or the Bronx. The reticence of some Irish writers about specific locations can be exasperating.
A review of The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene
As a feat of storytelling, though, The Ministry of Fear is both instructive (e.g. for the way certain significant events happen “off-stage” and the way in which certain characters – Prentice being one – act as a lodestone or lightening rod for the emotional force of the story) and impressive. This is a minor work, then, but a novel with its own strengths and satisfactions; and it is an interesting precursor of much of what was to follow.
A review of You Don’t Love Me Yet by Jonathan Lethem
Under the fury and passion individual characters disappear. Motivations become subterranean and capricious. The book becomes plastic elastic where anything can happen. It is unforgivably extravagant to base so much of the book on the encounters of two sweaty bodies.
A review of My Antonia by Willa Cather
My Antonia is a great novel, a classic that does not disappoint. Perhaps most of all, it is about what true wealth is. Reading it, one is reminded often of The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley: there is the same look back toward childhood and the same richly allusive and resonant symbolism.
A review of The Seventh Candidate by Howard Waldman
This is a bleak book which ends on a barely qualified note of endurance persisting over adversity. It is a competently written book with vivid characterizations. Waldman’s skill in depiction of the desperate straits of a forlorn man and woman is compelling and carries the reader from beginning to end effortlessly.
A review of The God of Spring by Arabella Edge
I thoroughly enjoyed and was totally swept up in the world of this marvellous story and can’t wait to see what Edge produces next. Highly recommended to all who love art, are engaged in art-making, or who have an interest in moral and philosophical issues to do with the exploitation of life in art’s service.
A review of The White Hands and Other Weird Tales by Mark Samuels
Certainly it is clear that, for Samuels, horror fiction is cerebral as well as visceral, and provides an opportunity for metaphysical speculation. And often it is not suspense, the vexed question of “what happens next?”, but rather seeing what use the author makes of his ideas that enthrals the reader. An example par excellence of this is “Mannequins in Aspects of Terror”, which takes as its subject a visit to an artist’s installation.
A review of Seeing by José Saramago
This is a vigorously told novel. There is wit in abundance, but Saramago never shirks the truth. This is a grim tale and Saramago’s focus, for all his pretence of indirection, is unerring and relentless. As a testament to our sad times and as a work of genius it is indispensable to the judicious and discriminating reader
A review of Salmon Fishing in the Yemen by Paul Torday
Reviewed by Bob Williams Salmon Fishing in the Yemen by Paul Torday Harcourt 2007, ISBN 978-0-15-101276-3, $24.00, 336 pages Paul Torday, born in 1946, waited a long time before he wrote this, his first novel, and did a bang-up job…