Brass – 3/5 Stars So on the one hand this book falls a little into the generic kind of circa 1990s second generation immigrant American novel that was big for a good while. I recently read Charming Billy by Alice McDermott, which does this very thing. And then on the other hand, this book is a solidly written novel. Or rather, it is a novel, but it a challenging kind of narrative. For one, the story is good and interesting, but also a little typical […]
I am the narrator: a discreet and self-effacing narrator. This book is not about me. I knew, though not in most cases at all well, a number of the dramatis personae and I lived (and live) in the town where the events hereinafter recounted took place. For purposes of convenience, for instance so that my ‘characters’ may be able (very occasionally) to refer to me or address me, I shall call myself ‘N’.
I tend to really like Iris Murdoch novels, and though I sometimes worry about how similar several of her novels are to one another, I still move forward. The set up of this novel immediately began to prickle that sense of familiarity. There’s a youngish set of potential ingenue type characters and there’s an older and revered master of some kind of field and there’s bound to be cris-crossing love triangles and or quadrangles. So going in, I figured, well this one will be similar […]
One should go easy on smashing other people’s lies.
Iris Murdoch writes strange novels. There’s an element of the grotesque in them that is not quite the same as say a Gothic novel or especially an American novel, but her characters are often quite capable of true horrors and awfulness without the kind of severity and cruelty of a Heathcliff but also not with the kind of detached irony of a parodic or satirical one. On the other hand, characters like Charles Arrowby might just be the most cruelly ironic evil character I can […]
Short novels Final!
God on the Rocks – 3/5 Stars https://www.amazon.com/God-Rocks-Jane-Gardam/dp/1933372761/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1512942968&sr=8-1&keywords=god+on+the+rocks Jane Gardam is most well known in contemporary circles for her novel Old Filth, which is a kind of running joke on “Failed in London, Try Hong Kong” and so that novel has a final moments of the British Empire in closing feel to it. This novel is an earlier one, from 1978, and takes places during the war. It has a 1970s politics feel to it alongside the feel of the time period in which it’s set. […]