Tag Archives | review

“Mr Palomar” by Italo Calvino

24 April 2009 · Reading · Comments { 1 }

Mr. Palomar sets out to examine every possible aspect of his life and the world around him, trying to name everything and categorise everything scientifically. Of course he fails, and it’s in the episodes of life squirming away from his rigid attempts at classification that the absurd humour comes. The arrangement of the book corresponds [...]

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"Three Stories" by Alan Bennett

5 December 2008 · Reading · Comments { 0 }

All three of these stories have a deeply satirical flavour, with dry, mostly successful humour and pointed observations on the various absurdities and hypocrisies we live by. “The Laying on of Hands” describes a memorial service for a masseur to the rich and famous, at which everyone (including the priest) is secretly worrying about whether [...]

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“Afterwards” by Rachel Seiffert

14 July 2008 · Reading · Comments { 0 }

The style of writing is very conversational. No beauty, not even many full sentences. The sort of writing with not many verbs. Just reportage,and not always very grammatical, like you were hearing someone tell you it on the phone. That part didn’t work for me, but the advantage of it was that it focused my [...]

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“Identity” by Milan Kundera

4 May 2008 · Reading · Comments { 0 }

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 [...]

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“Pandora in the Congo” by Albert Sanchez Pinol

27 April 2008 · Reading · Comments { 0 }

I got this as a reviewing freebie from LibraryThing, which was good because with its title and retro cover of cartoonish man emerging from jungle, I would probably never have picked it up in a bookshop. In fact, it turns out to be a postmodern pastiche of African adventure novels, with a strong metafictional element [...]

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