Category Archive: Fiction
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
(by James Hogg) The protagonist, Robert Wringhim, finds himself spiraling deeper into a vortex of evil. Luckily there’s a mysterious but nice young chap to ‘guide’ him on his way. A towering, fascinating ‘mystery’ novel, revealing how dangerous it is to mix Calvinism and Old Scratch.
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 →Nostromo
(by Joseph Conrad) Conrad’s robust, sinewy and subtle story of silver madness is the best thing he ever did.
Continue Reading →The Moon and Sixpence
(by W. Somerset Maugham) W struggled to create a genuine primitive but he comes close with Charles Strickland, a nasty and tormented artist, based on Paul Gauguin (born 7 June 1848, died 8 May 1903 in Polynesia). Strickland’s exchanges with the Maugham-like narrator are great fun. “Don’t you care whether you paint well or badly?” “I don’t. I want only to paint what I see.”
Continue Reading →Middlemarch
(by George Eliot) Honestly, you just want to smash Dorothea Brookes’ face in.
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