Posts tagged world war two

A potential novel: In the Wolf’s Mouth by Adam Foulds

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Reading Adam Foulds’s new novel In the Wolf’s Mouth, I was reminded of literary movements like Oulipo, which explored the concept of ‘potential literature’. Don’t get me wrong: it’s not that the novel is particularly experimental. It’s the ‘potential’ aspect that stuck in my head. In the world of Oulipo and others, the emphasis was more on the creation of new possibilities, rather than the actual execution of those ideas. In the Wolf’s Mouth is in some ways a potential novel. It sets up a scenario involving multiple characters and storylines,… Read More

“The Flanders Road” by Claude Simon

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Not an easy read, this. The style is experimental, with prose that mimics the way we think rather than the way we’d normally tell a story. So there’s a lot of jumping around from memory to memory by association rather than logic or chronology. The sentences are often long and winding, with digressions and then digressions within digressions, and often the narrator contradicts himself or changes his mind, or says there’s really no way to tell anyway, and just as often it’s not even clear who the narrator is or… Read More