Category Archive: WRITING & LITERATURE
The Evil Eye
Blood-and-Guts-Oates Image by Larry D Moore CC A-SA 4.0
(by Joyce Carol Oates) Joyce Carol Oates confounds me. Why is it that she is right up there in the pantheon of Writers-I-Want-To-Be, while I so often find her writing lacklustre? Why does she write so much? Why does she persist in the annoying over-use of italics to emphasise? Why does she use her full, unwieldy name? Is there a “Joyce Oates” out there writing “blood-and-guts” fiction? Perhaps the answer to all of my JCO-related questions is that she needs an editor who will tell her the truth. These four novellas are examples of work which is good but not good enough. The common factor is…
Continue Reading →The Doomsday Book
Are we in...when?
(Connie Willis) Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog (1998) time-travel novel was so disappointing that this (often hasty) reader determined to read and to say nothing of this author again. However, the main ingredients of The Doomsday Book (1992) (Oxford, time travel, Middle Ages) were interesting enough to cause this (often ridiculously optimistic) reader to give Willis another go. I hoped that the author might have honed her skills after finishing To Say Nothing of the Dog, and have travelled back in time to improve the earlier novel. Or something. But I was (surprisingly) wrong. An amusing idea is thinly imagined and stretched. The cast of characters…
Continue Reading →Egypt and Nubia
(Written by William Brockedon, lithographs by Louis Haghe, from drawings made on the spot by David Roberts RA) (1847) It may not be the most propitious time to visit Egypt or indeed the Sudan. Cheaper and safer to buy this sumptuous single volume Folio edition with the remarkable plates of David Roberts, a Member of the Royal Academy and a high master of in situ painting and (back at the studio, obviously) lithography. and today…
Continue Reading →Penguin Island
"Now, what would Pyrot do?"
(Anatole France) (1908) A brilliant and literary satire of the rise and fall of civilisation, replacing evolving man with evolving penguin, a flock of whom are baptised by the half-blind Abbe Maël and whose ascent takes the form of first clothes, the nascent concept of property, monogamous marriage, the rise of dogma and the renaissance, even the Dreyfus affair. Along the way, France savages the historian in a way that suggests the opprobrium he got for his Jeanne d’Arc was taken fairly personally. His penguinographer prefaces in perplexity, “We do not know exactly how things have happened, and the historian’s…
Continue Reading →Vanity Fair
(William Makepeace Thackeray) (1848) Well. Rebecca Sharp. She’s a real dilly. Nabokov, apropos Humbert Humbert, pointed out there were not many memorable literary characters we’d like our children to meet: “Would we like our sons to marry Emma Rouault, Becky Sharp or la belle dame sans merci?”* This vivid and wordy book has caused charges of carelessness to be leveled at WMT: the chronology is at times out of whack, different characters seem to age in different time dimensions, for instance. But so what? This is a masterpiece of playful improvisation, and after all, plenty of dull, dud novels have been…
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