Tag: literature

A Review of The Scar by China Mieville

Much of what makes Mieville’s work so appealing to readers not normally enamoured with fantasy literature is classic literary technique. His settings are very well mapped out, his characters are complex and, strong and very real, even when they are…

A Review of Baudolino by Umberto Eco

In this, his fourth novel, professional liar Umberto Eco spins the yarn of Baudolino, a fellow artificer hailing from Eco’s hometown of Alessandria and possessing more than a bit of the author’s personality. Like Eco, Baudolino is a master of…

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 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 Eclipse by John Banville

This book, though short, demands slow, close reading. It is a difficult book as much from the artfulness of the author as from the tragic subject. All critics have commented on the beauty of Banville’s writing and this beauty sustains…

A Review of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections

 The style is edged in irony as one might expect with such a subject but there are few quotable passages. Franzen is more concerned with the production of a seamless narrative. Although there are no solecisms, a few sentences are…

A Review of Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift

A Review of Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift  Humboldt’s Gift has its picaresque side and the selection of types and traumas may be looked at as modern translations of Huck’s own troubles and concerns. The honesty of the writer is a…