The community of Another is a bleak one to be sure—a distopia which is all too real. Death is everywhere, and those that hurt you most are those who should be protecting you. The community is empty and disfunctional, and everyone we meet is poor, damaged, and full of ugly pain and scars. It isn’t pretty, but somehow Deane’s exquisite writing contains beauty that transcends its setting, and hope which goes beyond the unhappy ending.
Tag: fiction
A review of American Youth by Phil LaMarche
American Youth is a perfectly rendered novel which manages that difficult balance between absolute topicality—this is a novel for our times—and timeless beauty. This is both a classic piece of literature and an important chronicle of a generation desperate to get out of a downward spiral.
A review of Nights in the Asylum by Carol Lefevre
I believe this is an important Australian novel which addresses the contemporary dilemma of the asylum seeker. The novel comes at a time when the refugee issue is transforming from one of a (frustrating, on my part) general apathy towards ‘queue-jumpers’ around the time of the SIEVX to a burgeoning collective empathy (perhaps guilt) towards refugees genuinely seeking asylum in this country.
A review of The Sonnet Lover by Carol Goodman
The Sonnet Lover is tightly plotted and skilfully executed, and would appeal particularly to lovers of literary sleuthing and academic intrigue, courtly poetry, Shakespeare’s sonnets, Venice and Florence, and readers familiar with the political wranglings that go on behind closed doors in universities.
A review of The Blood of Flowers by Anita Amirrezvani
Although this is a young woman’s story, it would be wrong to paint it as a ‘feminist narrative’. The strictures of life for women of strict Muslim cultures are well-known, but the author’s goal does not seem so much to point out the unfairness of the culture as to paint a portrait of a memorable and believable individual who learns how to prosper within these strictures – in other words this is an example of, in Joseph Campbell’s words, ‘a hero’s journey’.
A review of Trilby by George du Maurier
I think the greatest merit of Trilby is in its obviously deeply-felt evocation of the Bohemian, artistic side of Paris in the middle of the 19th century. I have come across some indication [6] that what Du M wrote may not have been literally true in its details … but it is hard to believe that the spirit of Du M’s writing is not somehow true.
A review of Take a Breath & Hold It by Michael de Valle
Take a Breath & Hold It is a book which doesn’t flinch from life’s blackest, most feared experiences. It faces them head-on, and there are no euphemisms. Death, insanity, jealousy and fear are ever present, in every story, as in every life, and they feel as bad as always. But along with all of that, and even at its lowest ebb, there is still beauty everywhere in this collection.
A review of Landing by Emma Donoghue
The description of modern Dublin is good and it is a pleasure to read an author who is not afraid to take us to Stonybatter or Trinity as naturally as an American novelist would take us to Halstead Street or the Bronx. The reticence of some Irish writers about specific locations can be exasperating.
A review of The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene
As a feat of storytelling, though, The Ministry of Fear is both instructive (e.g. for the way certain significant events happen “off-stage” and the way in which certain characters – Prentice being one – act as a lodestone or lightening rod for the emotional force of the story) and impressive. This is a minor work, then, but a novel with its own strengths and satisfactions; and it is an interesting precursor of much of what was to follow.
A review of You Don’t Love Me Yet by Jonathan Lethem
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.