Author Archive: Lesley Jakobsen
Ender’s Game (by Orson Scot Card)
Make no mistake. This is a Young Adult book. It masquerades as “adult science fiction” on many a best-of list, but it is a novel for the tweens and teens. Unlike Ender – who between the ages of 6 and 11 trains day and night to save the world – this book is just too juvenile to impress grown-ups . Far be it from us at TVC to suggest that calling this a novel for adults is to misguide the reader, but let’s just say that it is a bit like promoting Harry Potter as a really really good read for grown-ups too. If you want to…
Continue Reading →The Rhythm of the Heat
Songs in Our Heart # 16 The Rhythm of the Heat (Peter Gabriel) (Written by Peter Gabriel; released September 1982) [Screw WOMAD; instead, simply listen to this powerful Jung-in-Africa primal masterpiece.]
Continue Reading →The Wicked Boy: The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer
The Police News artist was sure to include the truncheon which was found at the murder scene in a suggestive manner in his drawing.
(by Kate Summerscale) In the Prologue to this true-crime story, Summerscale describes a injured eleven-year old boy’s four mile walk along a dirt track in New South Wales, Australia, to report a crime. The prologue is intended to, and does, make us wonder about the connection between the plight of this Australian boy in 1930 and the life of a twelve-year old boy – Robert Coombes, the “wicked boy” of the title – who killed his mother in Plaistow, East London in 1895. That is the most interesting aspect of Summerscales’ book. The story of how Robert Coombes (with or without the connivance of his brother…
Continue Reading →Moravagine (by Blaise Cendrars)
Paul le Farge points out in his learned introduction to the nyrb edition of this tremendous novel that, as Blaise Cendrars is the alter ego of the author, Frederic Sauser, so Moravagine is Blaise Cendrars’ alter ego. Moravagine, perhaps the sole authentic descendant of the last King of Hungary, perhaps merely a hallucination, is “a dark little man skinny, knotted and desiccated as a vine-stock, seemingly burned by the flame that flickers in the depths of his great eyes. His forehead is low. His eye-sockets deep. The circles beneath his eyes almost touch the creases about his mouth. His right leg,…
Continue Reading →The Talented Mr Ripley
(by Patricia Highsmith) Talented Tom Ripley is. He has a facility for languages, art appreciation and deception. Charming Tom Ripley is not. Full marks to Highsmith for avoiding that trap. Tom thinks he is a master of seduction, a truly interesting and ingratiating kind of chameleon. He is even a little annoyed and contemptuous of the ease with which (he believes) he can fit in wherever he choses. Sadly for Tom and so many other psychopaths, he has no insight and cannot see that in fact he baffles and repels any slightly discerning human. Sadly for Tom’s target Dickie Greenleaf and his entourage, they are themselves neither discerning nor moral and are ripe…
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