Reviews
January 10, 2012
Sailing on the Open Sea: John Updike’s Higher Gossip: Essays and Criticism 1
by Jaya Aninda Chatterjee
The collection focalizes Updike’s mid-to-late career as a man of letters. It also foregrounds his secondary reputation as a consummate art critic.
January 4, 2012
Nihilists Have Feelings, Too: Michel Houellebecq’s The Map and the Territory 8
by Bill Morris
Michel Houellebecq may be a petty misanthrope and an average prose stylist, but he can also be drop-dead funny.
December 27, 2011
Storytelling is a Deadly Business: Krzhizhanovsky’s The Letter Killers Club 2
by Daniel Kalder
These tales are harder than the grotesques of Gogol. Borges, too, you suspect, is up to something relatively straightforward compared to Krzhizhanovsky.
November 30, 2011
Naples and The Gallery 2
by Emily St. John Mandel
John Horne Burns’ The Gallery was his first book, a chronicle of the chaos and beauty and horror of occupied Naples in 1943 and 1944. It’s an interesting hybrid: a novel in which stories alternate with an elegant travelogue, and the travelogue appears to be the author’s memoir: “I remember that at Casablanca it dawned on me that maybe I’d come overseas to die.”
November 29, 2011
Alasdair Gray’s Excellent Last Last Novel is Really Four-in-One 2
by Ranbir Sidhu
One could argue that Gray has been writing his last book for years (and for some years, he’s said as much, though always managing to push out something new and even more “last,” like the never-ending last tours of The Who).
November 25, 2011
My Mother is a Book: On Elisabeth Gille’s The Mirador 1
by Sam Allingham
No matter how liberal we consider ourselves about the slippery line between memoir and autobiographical fiction – even if we are more Exley than Oprah on the matter – there is still something that seems suspicious about the enterprise of full-on fictional memoir. Is this allowable? Can one simply jump in and narrate the course of another person’s life. Perhaps – if you do it right.
