I read this book before it was exposed as containing significant doses of fiction. I was blown away by the raw power of the story and the spare, hard-hitting writing. It’s hard for me to say how much of that was because I thought it was true. Certainly that added something. When you believe the [...]
Tag Archives | Interesting things I’ve read
“The Color Purple” by Alice Walker
This is a deeply religious book, in a couple of different senses. First of all, the main character, Celie, narrates the book through letters she writes to God. She is trapped in abusive relationships, first with Pa and then with her husband Albert, referred to by her as Mr ______. She writes to God because [...]
“A Pale View of Hills” by Kazuo Ishiguro
Most of this novel is memory: a woman thinking about her daughter’s suicide and remembering an earlier summer in post-War Nagasaki. Almost nothing happens in the present day. The whole story takes place in the past. And the story in the past is full of holes. At first this annoyed me but, the more I [...]
“To have and have not” by Ernest Hemingway
The original New York Times review in 1937 put it this way: Mr. Hemingway has been for some years an outstanding figure in American literature; he has influenced greatly men a little younger than himself, and they have paid him the tribute of imitation. Whatever he does is of interest because he has, unquestionably, a [...]
Franco Moretti on the Novel
Read a very interesting piece by Franco Moretti in New Left Review, July/August 2008. It seems like a synopsis of a much longer, multi-volume work on the theory of the novel, which I plan to read when I have time. Moretti talks about the theory of the novel by asking three surprising questions: Why are [...]
“Identity” by Milan Kundera
Warning: this review gives away the ending. There’s something intensely dissatisfying about stories that end “but it was all a dream and then she woke up.” Logically, I suppose there shouldn’t be. We accept that a story is made up, we accept that nothing is true, that it is all in effect a dream being [...]
