If you agree that a great book does compel you to reread your own soul, you will find yourself contemplating the capabilities of the human spirit after finishing The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan. What astonished me most about this award-winning novel was the way contradictions … Read More
Category: fiction
“…her relationship with him was like being content in a house but always sitting by the window and looking out.”
One of the many remarkable attributes of Chimanda Ngozi Adichie‘s dazzling novel Americanah is her ability to capture a complex condition, situation, or decision in just a few precise words. She describes the central character’s loneliness this way “… she felt sheathed in a translucent haze of difference.” (80) … Read More
“You were right to tell me that in life, it is not the future which counts, but the past.”
What kind of person believes that the past is more important than the future? Wouldn’t the least likely be someone with amnesia? The central character in this novel by Nobel Prize-winner Patrick Modiano is a Parisian who has no memory of his life before the second world war. It appears … Read More
“We are, I know not why, double within us.”
Mark Haddon’s extraordinary novel The Red House appears to be built on the ideas and style of the essays written by Michel de Montaigne in the 1500s, and I can’t think of a better, more inventive, choice. As we see with the “double within ourselves” line, he quotes Montaigne directly, … Read More
“Which way lies truth, in the end? In power, or in Art?”
Novelists make assumptions about their readers’ interest in technical details, whether they’re writing about sabotage, romance or philosophy. The Elegance of the Hedgehog is written by a philosophy professor who assumes we want to know the technical details of her two main character’s struggle to find a philosophy of life … Read More
“It was terribly hot that summer Mr. Robertson left town, and for a long while the river seemed dead.”
What should the first sentence in a great novel do? Set the tone, establish the location and perhaps introduce the main character? The first sentence in Amy and Isabelle by Elizabeth Strout does more than that. It gives us the dying river image, which prepares us for the idea … Read More
“The strangest thing about my wife’s return from the dead was how other people reacted.”
Oh, how I love an unreliable narrator! Our quote is the first sentence of the novel, and it’s clearly a flat-out lie. (The strangest thing about anyone’s return from the dead is that it happened — of course people thought it’s strange.) So, if the main character tells us in … Read More
“The menu, like love, was full of delicate, gruesome things — cheeks, tongues, thymus glands.”
No writer can make me laugh harder but wince longer than Lorrie Moore. Here is a sample of her humor: “Mike’s friends, however, tended to be tense, intellectually earnest Protestants who drove new, metallic-hued cars and who within five minutes of light conversation could be counted on at … Read More
“We can’t chose what we want and what we don’t want and that’s the hard lonely truth.”
At 771 pages, this is a long novel. Is it worth it? Many of the 57 commentators on the Kirkus review didn’t think so. However, I love the way Tartt develops big themes. And she has sentences that are works of art. The NY Times review, written by Stephen … Read More