Like all heresies, his novels challenge our most fundamental beliefs: our belief in the moral integrity of ‘fiction’, our belief in the usefulness of storytelling when the daily truths thrown up by our misbegotten world cry out for immediate, practical…
Tag: fiction
A review of Among the Blacks: Two Works by Raymond Roussel and Ron Padgett
The translation is a delicate, accomplished work that captures perfectly the placid emptiness that lies at the heart of Roussel’s world. A flurry of outlandish and bizarre events is related to the reader, but in a manner that is formal,…
A review of The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington
The humour is at its strongest when it mixes the exotic with the homely. At one point Marlborough, a kind of latter-day Noah, says of his sisters, one of whom is a werewolf who comes to mate with a wolf,…
A review of Murder in Memoriam by Didier Daeninckx
Murder in Memoriam is a police procedural that is entertaining, suspenseful and thought-provoking. There is a clandestine feel to much of the story, a sense that there are espionage agencies working in the shadows, and it is similar to Michael…
A review of 100 Bullets: First Shot, Last Call by Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso
Brian Azzarello’s story is top-notch and is written with a street dialogue that even Elmore Leonard might envy. Eduardo Risso’s artwork is evocative and vivid. He can paint a bleak cityscape of housing projects and basketball courts, move from the…
A review of Last Night by James Salter
James Salter is an extraordinary writer and I envy those who are coming to him for the first time. His stories could be said to “explore character”, but that would be too pat and too simple; rather, they reveal soul.…
A review of The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana
The relationship between the opening of the novel and the ending of it are interwoven powerfully. The theme of what makes a person unique, the relationship between human identity, language, the cultural versus the personal memory, and even the relationship…
A review of The Fall of Rome by Martha Southgate
Although not an unusual narrative strategy, it demands much of an author and it is a pleasure here to see how Southgate rises beautifully to the occasion. Southgate goes beyond this to the extreme virtuosity of a narrative for the…
A review of Another Way to Dance by Martha Southgate
It is believability indeed that makes Another Way to Dance such a special book. The style is natural and, if not always grammatical, consistent with the language of an exceptionally bright teenager. I can’t think of any reader who would…
A review of Upstaged by Aaron Paul Lazar
The interaction of the student performers and stagehands is brilliantly described and there is shrewd observation in the treatment of the sexual predator Armand Lugio, the witchy stage-mother Agnes Bigelow and the gay youngster Nelson Santos who explores the world…