The children of the movies have seen our world destroyed a hundred times–we can accept the apocalypse, even guiltily savour it, but we want the smouldering ruins to have grandeur.
Describing a book as “beautiful” can be dismissed as a lame start to a piece of criticism. A word more at home among the spidery handwriting of a schoolchild’s book report, the self-respecting critic treats it as gingerly as someone with high blood pressure handles the salt cellar. But (aside from the fact this is […]
The children of the movies have seen our world destroyed a hundred times–we can accept the apocalypse, even guiltily savour it, but we want the smouldering ruins to have grandeur.
This week’s New Yorker features a short story from Roddy Doyle, called “The Photograph.” It’s not bad, clearly the work of a skilled practitioner. But I’m not sure if it deserves its occupation of what are probably the most coveted pages in Anglophone letters. Doyle’s style–which might be dubbed “proletarian stream of consciousness”–is beginning to […]
Just as the hysterical claims that the Sheffield outfit has already surpassed The Beatles in musical achievement have the paradoxical effect of making me never want to hear another track from the ‘world-beating album‘ by the Arctic Monkeys, so the assertions that David Foster Wallace is the best writer of his (our?) generation have ensured […]
OK, first off, Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America is an entertaining work, its ‘counterfactual’ premise evoking for me those yellow-jacketed Gollancz sci-fi novels that I borrowed from the local library before I dutifully moved on to ‘proper’ literature. In fact, the alternative history that Roth limns in this novel -that Charles Lindbergh’s successful Republican […]
The publication of Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson in 1990 announced the arrival of a new intellectual voice. That work – with its startlingly immodest ambition to “demonstrate the unity and continuity of western culture” – embodied what has come to be seen as Paglia’s hallmark style: deep […]
Jean-Paul Sartre was born 100 years ago today. His reputation has taken a bit of a battering since his death in 1980–his wilful blindness* to the atrocities perpetrated by Stalin is perhaps the biggest black mark against him. But don’t be put off by the stereotypical image of the bug-eyed monstre sacré wreathed in cigarette […]
John Banville’s new novel, The Sea, presents us with Max Morden, recently widowed (or is that widowered? as Max mordantly wonders) and returned to the sea-side resort of his childhood. While turning over fragments from his married life with Anna, Max also recalls the strange bond he formed many years ago with the dazzling Graces, […]
David Mitchell has repeatedly proved his talents at a chastening productive rate. His first novel, Ghostwritten, was published in 1999 before the author turned 30. His second book, Number9dream (2001), was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. With his third work, Cloud Atlas, Mitchell not only garnered a second nomination for the book prize, he achieved […]
Ishiguro’s story of love, loss and hidden truths, reviewed by Shane Barry, is a flawed but consistently unsettling work.