This is a fine postwar novel in the tradition of others that expressed dehumanization and even nihilism after the catastrophic death and destruction of World War II. Unlike many others (such as The Sheltering Sky, The Stranger), in this one … Continue reading
This is the kind of airport novel I used to read when I traveled a lot. Since then I’ve learned how to read literature with characters who develop self-awareness over time and stories that illuminate the human condition. I’m afraid … Continue reading
This is supposedly more accessible than Gravity’s Rainbow, the ponderous postmodern exercise for which Pynchon won the National Book Award in 1974, although the Pynchon style is the same. This is a lighthearted detective story, with the PI, Doc Sportello trying … Continue reading
Fine writing is the main attraction of this novel, set in Japan and China immediately after WW II. Individual scenes and character gestures are sometimes done with such elegance and grace that the prose verges on poetry. “Until this, war … Continue reading
This book was recommended to me as an example of how to show characters’ emotions effectively, something I struggle with. It’s the story of a woman whose husband abruptly abandons her for a younger woman, leaving her adrift and with … Continue reading
I recently saw, on DVD, Wise Blood, the movie based on a novel by Flannery O’Connor. Criterion has reissued this 1979 gem, all cleaned up, and with annotations and interviews for context. The movie increased my respect for O’Connor. I … Continue reading
This book falls into in the category of magical realism by most accounts, but I didn’t see a lot of that, especially compared to Marquez or Rushdie, for example. Instead, the stories told are better characterized as fantastic, amazing, improbable, … Continue reading
Life at the Bottom of the Food Chain The images and details in this novel are haunting. They linger in the mind days after you’re done reading. To me, that’s a sign of good writing. Here are some passages with the … Continue reading
One’s personal viewpoint, constrained as it is by embodiment in time and location, is necessarily only one way of seeing things. Fortunately, we are capable of abstraction and generalization, so we can imagine viewpoints other than our own, and even, … Continue reading
The second-person narrator, Balram Halwai, is a boy who wipes tables in a bakery in a poor village in India – a bakery his grandfather once owned but which was seized by a rich person. His father now pedals a … Continue reading