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…
Tag: literature
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 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…
A review of Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov
There are some wonderful classic novels which are well worth reading and re-reading. Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin is one of those, and guest reviewer Tom Frenkel, turns his analytical eye on Pnin. Nabokov is most famous for his novel Lolita, but…
The Already Falling-Away Moment: Sarah Stonich’s These Granite Islands
The book reads easily and quickly, but the slow action and gentle nature of Stonich’s prose conceals a powerful message of life, love, and the human condition: how we make meaning from our short lives. Reviewed by Magdalena Ball THESE…
A review of Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet
Love is the main hero of this novel which is about, among other things, love, loss, life, death, the lines between truth and fiction, beauty, and art. Reviewed by Magdalena Ball “In the front lobby, carved into a stone wall,…