Category Archive: Comedic Books
Something Happened
(by Joseph Heller) The best review of this amusing, desolate book was by Kurt Vonnegut in the NYTRB, reproduced in his collection, Palm Sunday, where he nails the essential bleakness of Heller’s worldview: “that many lives, judged by the standards of the people who live them, are simply not worth living.” ‘Everyone seems pleased with the way I’ve taken command.’
Continue Reading →Snooty Baronet
(by Wyndham Lewis) Lewis was an incendiary hater and this savage and hilarious trifle is worth a read for his acrid scenes involving his literary agent, ‘Humph’, including the delightful dispatching thereof.
Continue Reading →Pale Fire
(by Vladimir Nabokov) Great post-modernism. With fake scholarship, confected verse and unreliable commentary (a triple Ephialtes). “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain by the false azure in the windowpane…”
Continue Reading →I Like You
Image courtesy of the second funniest, creepiest hospitality book of all time - The Weber Cookbook.
(by Amy Sedaris) Indubitably the creepiest, funniest book on hospitality ever written.
Continue Reading →A House for Mr Biswas
(by V. S. Naipaul) With Transparent Things, the best nihilist comedy ever: a long, lovely, sad, frustrating look at defiant failure Mohun Biswas. Full of ‘amazing scenes’ and family strife in Trinidad. When Biswas daubs brightly coloured spots of zinc cream on his face and goes out onto the footpath to watch the world go by, it is hard not to laugh till you cry. The notoriously scratchy Mr Naipaul has produced an impressive oeuvre down the years, but this is certainly his best book. He has written that it is…
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