Under the fury and passion individual characters disappear. Motivations become subterranean and capricious. The book becomes plastic elastic where anything can happen. It is unforgivably extravagant to base so much of the book on the encounters of two sweaty bodies.
A review of My Antonia by Willa Cather
My Antonia is a great novel, a classic that does not disappoint. Perhaps most of all, it is about what true wealth is. Reading it, one is reminded often of The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley: there is the same look back toward childhood and the same richly allusive and resonant symbolism.
A review of Reuben Fine by Aidan Woodger
Although the games are, naturally, the meat of the book, Woodger also finds space to include an immense amount of other interesting information: tables of all Fine’s tournament and match results; a brief biography; an annotated bibliography of all of Fine’s writings on chess; myriad appreciations of his play from the great and the good; a précis of a paper on blindfold chess (i.e. chess played without sight of the board and pieces) that Fine published in an academic journal in 1965; and much else besides.
A review of Every Move You Make by David Malouf
Although “The Domestic Cantata” is the most complex and extraordinary of the stories in this collection, all of the stories are set off by Malouf’s clear love of life that underpins the work. The plots move easily and the characters all develop forward, but it is the collective meaning created by the glimpse at something that goes beyond the prose that builds these stories that makes them so remarkable. This is a not to be missed collection of stories that are as important as they are pleasurable.
A review of The Seventh Candidate by Howard Waldman
This is a bleak book which ends on a barely qualified note of endurance persisting over adversity. It is a competently written book with vivid characterizations. Waldman’s skill in depiction of the desperate straits of a forlorn man and woman is compelling and carries the reader from beginning to end effortlessly.
A review of Beating for Light by Geoff Akers
This is an extremely well-written and worthwhile work that will appeal especially to those readers who have found tragedy and beauty in Sebastian Faulks’Birdsong or Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy. Like these other novels, Beating for Light makes us realise that war – with all its waste, horror and futility – has, too, a human face.
A review of The God of Spring by Arabella Edge
I thoroughly enjoyed and was totally swept up in the world of this marvellous story and can’t wait to see what Edge produces next. Highly recommended to all who love art, are engaged in art-making, or who have an interest in moral and philosophical issues to do with the exploitation of life in art’s service.
A review of The White Hands and Other Weird Tales by Mark Samuels
Certainly it is clear that, for Samuels, horror fiction is cerebral as well as visceral, and provides an opportunity for metaphysical speculation. And often it is not suspense, the vexed question of “what happens next?”, but rather seeing what use the author makes of his ideas that enthrals the reader. An example par excellence of this is “Mannequins in Aspects of Terror”, which takes as its subject a visit to an artist’s installation.
A review of Seeing by José Saramago
This is a vigorously told novel. There is wit in abundance, but Saramago never shirks the truth. This is a grim tale and Saramago’s focus, for all his pretence of indirection, is unerring and relentless. As a testament to our sad times and as a work of genius it is indispensable to the judicious and discriminating reader
A review of Salmon Fishing in the Yemen by Paul Torday
Reviewed by Bob Williams Salmon Fishing in the Yemen by Paul Torday Harcourt 2007, ISBN 978-0-15-101276-3, $24.00, 336 pages Paul Torday, born in 1946, waited a long time before he wrote this, his first novel, and did a bang-up job…