I found A Room with a View to be, if not in the absolute top rank, nevertheless a very worthwhile piece of literature. Aside from being a sensitive study of a woman who often doesn’t know herself well enough, it is a…
Tag: fiction
A Review of Tim Winton’s Dirt Music
Dirt Music is one of those books that gets under your skin. Comes into your bed with you; changes your dreams; travels with you throughout the mundane details of everyday life. Winton’s descriptive prose works both externally in its depiction…
The Dead: An Outline Commentary
Noted Joycean Bob Williams provides a very thorough overview of one of the most beautiful and complex of short stories from James Joyce’s Dubliners. by Bob Williams Lily begins the story and she begins with a funny solecism: she “was literally…
A review of Salman Rushdie’s Fury
At 55, the Indian born, NY dwelling protagonist of Rushdie’s latest novel Fury, has the kind of rage which causes him to stand with a knife over the sleeping bodies of his wife and son, scream in public, and slip between…
A Review of Robert Dessaix’s Corfu
Corfu: A Novel is an ambitious work, which uses a range of literary techniques such as complex time sequencing, incorporation of other texts, and mise-en-abyme, or a series of stories within a story, to convey its meaning. The narrative moves forward…
Slippery Substances: A Review of V S Naipaul’s Half a Life
Slippery Substances: A Review of V S Naipaul’s Half a Life Half a life is set firstly in post-independence India, at the politically protected court of the Maharaja, later in London, then in the pre-independence Africa in a nameless country…
Evangelistic Future: A Review of James Stevens-Arce’s Soulsaver
TThe story takes place in a futuristic Puerto Rico, 2099, where narrator and hero , Juan Bautista Lorca is a member of the elite Soulsavers, charged with collecting SIDs, self-inflicted deaths or suicides, freezing them into Corpsicles in his FreezVan,…
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…
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,…