The End is the sixth and final volume of his epic My Struggle saga (Min Kamp in Norwegian, yes he really did call it that) and is a rather daunting 1153 pages long, to add to the 2500 plus he has already produced in the other five volumes. The series can be summarised as a semi or even mostly autobiographical telling of his life, which … Continue reading Karl Ove Knausgård – The End
This is the third mid to late 20th Century American novel I have recently read alongside John Williams’ Stoner and Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety, which also both have the complexities of marriage at the heart of their subject matter, but at the risk of letting proximity override objectivity I would say that it is the most affecting and interesting of the three. One of … Continue reading Revolutionary Road review
The Diary of a Nobody by George Grossmith illustrated by Weedon Grossmith The original “disgusted of Tunbridge Wells”, Mr Charles Pooter gave the English language the term Pooteresque, qualities celebrated by The Telegraph for being everything that an Englishman should be; unemotional, house proud, conservative, traditional, financially prudent and rule abiding. Unfortunately he is also a crushing bore and the object of this timeless Victorian … Continue reading May 2012 books round up
In recent years the phrase “major literary event” has been used to mean literary in the sense that it happens to be a book rather than a film (very temporarily) that is creating headlines around the world, notably Dan Brown, Harry Potter, Twilight etc. Haruki Murakami’s IQ84 is a rare exception to this, a multi-million selling novel that is also what critics like to call … Continue reading IQ84 by Haruki Murakami review
Paul Auster is a writer’s writer, or to his critics a writer that is self-indulgently always looking inward and is all style over substance. However, a discussion of postmodern or late twentieth American literature would be vastly incomplete without acknowledging the great contribution that Auster has made to it. Auster continually reinvents or breaks the rules of conventional fiction in order to comment on the … Continue reading Moon Palace and the Art of Paul Auster
John Fowles’s The Magus has proved to be his most enduringly popular work, yet unlike The French Lieutenant’s Woman it is by no means universally acclaimed and was often derided as a pop-psychology thriller. Mart Amis for one accused him of being a ‘middlebrow writer who doesn’t pretend to be otherwise.’ I believe there is a case to be made though for its reevaluation … Continue reading In Praise of John Fowles’s The Magus
In Jonathan Franzen’s acclaimed novel Freedom one of the intertexts that frames or guides the narrative is Tolstoy’s War and Peace. His friend and rival for the title of foremost modern American novelist, Jeffrey Eugenides, also reveals his admiration for the Russian master, but turns to the Anna Karenina instead. There is a wonderful passage where Madeleine, the heroine of the novel refers to … Continue reading The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
Warning: Contains plot spoilers! The title of Alan Hollinghurst’s fifth novel comes from Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H, one of several historical figures that feature in this richly allusive work. It is both a celebration of and a memorial for a way of English life that is long past, but made present through one poet, two families, two houses and many differing accounts from all those … Continue reading The Stranger’s Child by Alan Hollinghurst: Beyond Howards End
“I must stress this is my reading now of what happened then. Or rather my memory now of my reading then of what was happening at the time.” It is fairly uncommon these days for a novel’s physical presentation to make much more than a cursory impression in the age of mass production, but the slim hardback edition of Julian Barnes’s The Sense of … Continue reading The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes: review
Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at … Continue reading The best description of a hangover ever?- Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis
London to Norway 