Latest Literature Articles
The Ladies of Grace Adieu
Susanna Clarke
Bloomsbury USA
2006
The Ladies of Grace Adieu is the second book of Clarke’s saga, a moment for the writer to catch her breath before another big effort: eight short stories that give readers more information about the state of magic before Norrell and Strange and introduce yet more characters who will surely come back in future works, such as the half-faerie Alessandro Simonelli, who narrates “Mr Simonelli or The Faerie Widower”, and adventure buddies David Montefiore, a Jewish physician, and Tom Brightwind, a Faerie prince — as well as Brightwind’s bastard son, Lucius Winstanley, who conveniently disappears on a horse at the end of “Tom Brightwind or How the Fairy Bridge Was Built at Thoresby”.
1982, Janine
Alasdair Gray
Canongate
1984
1982, Janine is deceivingly modest: in a cheap hotel room somewhere in Scotland a middle-aged everyman drinks his minibar dry and tries to escape his thoughts and memories through wicked fantasies of bondage and domination. But one human mind can be more complex and fascinating than a whole world — than two worlds, even — and 1982, Janine is good evidence for it.
You Don't Love Me Yet
Jonathan Lethem
Doubleday
2007
Jonathan Lethem. He’s got everything right: the words, the rhythm, even that most elusive of substances, the humor. He doesn’t make it easy for the reader, doesn’t dumb his work down, and yet following his prose is so easy and pleasurable it often feels I could keep doing it forever. He is inventive without being showy, avoiding cliches as if they simply weren’t there.
Travels in the Scriptorium
Paul Auster
Henry Holt
2007
“Paul Auster is getting old”, my wife wrote on the first page of Travels in the Scriptorium. She’s right, as always; I’d only add he’s also really scared of it. Mr. Blank, Travels’ protagonist, has trouble walking and bending down, shakes so much he can’t feed himself, pees his pants. Add to these problems the facts that they are not attributed to old age alone — the shaking is a side effect of Mr. Blank’s medication, the urinary incident comes about from muscle relaxation due to a fall — and that Blank is clearly a fictional Auster, and the author’s feelings about getting old become more pungent still.
Death's Dark Abyss
Massimo Carlotto
Europa Editions
2004
In a post about a subject entirely alien to this review (if you must know, a critique of an article about Orthodox Jewish-American fiction written by Wendy Shalit for the New York Times Book Review), Ron Hogan passingly describes noir as “a genre in which idealism is often defined by its absence”. If we take this definition as standard, I think Death’s Dark Abyss by Italian author Massimo Carlotto is the noirest thing I’ve ever read.
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