Tag Archives | novels

“Aspects of the Novel” by E.M. Forster

1 April 2010 · Reading · Comments { 4 }

I read this book a couple of years ago now, before I had this blog. As I was clearing out stuff this weekend I came across my handwritten notes, stuffed into the bottom of a box where I would never have read them again. This is why I started blogging. I’m typing the notes up [...]

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British “state of the nation” novels

5 February 2010 · Literary events · Comments { 0 }

One of my fellow Legend Press authors, Mark Piggott, wrote an interesting article in the Independent about ‘state of the nation’ novels. I thought it would be complaining that nobody’s writing about contemporary British issues these days – there’s been quite a bit of that recently, because historical novels have been getting a lot of [...]

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“An Artist of the Floating World” by Kazuo Ishiguro

14 February 2009 · Reading · Comments { 1 }

An elderly, celebrated artist, Masuji Ono, is living in retirement in Japan just after the end of World War Two. His daughter is having trouble in her marriage negotiations for reasons he can’t understand: gradually he realises it’s because he is associated with the rise of Japanese militarism in the 1930s, a period now discredited [...]

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“A Pale View of Hills” by Kazuo Ishiguro

28 December 2008 · Reading · Comments { 1 }

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 [...]

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“To have and have not” by Ernest Hemingway

19 December 2008 · Reading · Comments { 0 }

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 [...]

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