If you chart Dickstein’s emphases as a line graph, you will find that it spikes sharply upward at certain authors. Although he sees Joyce, Mann, and Kafka as the dominant modernists, he writes relatively little about the first two compared to what he writes about Kafka. Joyce is too knotty a problem to be dealt with in a book that has many other considerations.
Tag: fiction
A review of Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You by Peter Cameron
In some ways it is like a very interesting first installment to a longer story. Although this disappoints one’s conventional longings for a neat fictional package, it is on more sophisticated grounds eminently satisfactory. This, the eighth book by Cameron, is an accomplishment that provides an irresistible blend of the moving and the witty.
A review of The River Baptists by Belinda Castles
Castles creates mood skilfully, as in the opening chapter where Danny and his father are fishing in their little boat. The blood on his father’s t-shirt from the worms and other creatures is symbolic of the man and his relationship with his family. The details of the community and the people who live there produce a sleepiness that is tinged with menace. There is much that moves under the surface of the water, occasionally bursting out to wreck havoc.
A review of Unknown Man Number 89 by Elmore Leonard
This is a crime novel that has some fine deadpan humour, a poignant romance – Ryan falls for a young woman who has problems with the bottle – and also has elements of the Western. Ryan is a kind of latter-day bounty hunter.
A review of Sybarite Among the Shadows by Richard McNeff
This is an unusual and intriguing novel and an entertaining foray into an earlier, stranger England. There are plenty of puns and amusing similes to smoothly move matters along (“The waiter was hovering over them with the forlorn air of the last penguin in the colony” is one) and Richard McNeff’s prose often gives sybaritic pleasure.
This is a story that transcends the limitations of “what actually happens” giving us a deeper sense of truth. What it succeeds at, is not so much uncovering the events that led to and followed the Eureka Stockade, but rather, creating a real, true sense of the people that lived then and what it means in terms of who we all are now.
A review of The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Though McCarthy resists the urge to give the reader too much hope—things can never be made right again–the memories of the boy, of trout that smell of moss in your hand; the “vermiculate patterns” of a world that once was, of the enduring conversations between a boy and his father, remain beautiful. And for his readers, these are things we still have now.
A review of The Blind Rider by Juan Goytisolo
The Blind Rider is a short, intense novel difficult to compare with others in the European canon; there is almost nothing like it. Mr Palomar comes close in intention, perhaps, but The Blind Rider wholly lacks Calvino’s sense of play. It is unrelentingly dark with dread and despair, as serious and unforgiving as Goya’s greatest art.
A review of Cripple Creek by James Sallis
There are echoes of crime fiction of the past – one wonderful minor character, Doc Oldham, could have stepped off the pages of at least two William Riley Burnett novels – and a gamut of genre pleasures. The greatest pleasure, though, is in how the story unfolds. It is an exercise in enchantment.
A review of Re’enev by Mike Maranhas
Luke Ferless is a compelling narrator to begin with. He attempts a kind of honesty, addressing the reader as if we were his analyst, trying to uncover his reasons and motivations as he addresses his actions in the present in terms of his past. Luke’s rich vocabulary and detailed self-analysis, add to his charm, but despite it all, there seems to be an underlying self-doubt and unconscious misogyny that undermines his justification.