With the passing of William H. Gass late last year, there is a vacancy in my heart for the title of best living English writer, but with Waiting For The Barbarians, first published nearly 40 years ago, South Africa’s J.M. […]
Edward St. Aubyn’s Mother’s Milk
by on May 7, 2018
Time passes even more quickly for Patrick Melrose, the eponymous hero of Edward St. Aubyn’s justly celebrated Patrick Melrose quintet of novels, than it does in real life. When we first met him, he was just five years old, an […]
Carlos Fuentes’ This I Believe
by on April 29, 2018
There is an entire sub-species of autobiography, generally written in the twilight of a man’s life, when he knows that the best is behind him and all that remains is the eternal silence of death. Nothing focuses the mind quite […]
Chantal Delsol’s Icarus Fallen
by on April 26, 2018
The French philosopher Chantal Delsol, in the first of her books to appear in English translation, presents us with an arresting metaphor for the condition of 21st century man, caught between the certainties of the past and the uncertainty of […]
Reiner Stach’s Kafka: The Early Years
by on April 20, 2018
We end at the beginning. The third and final volume of Reiner Stach’s ambitious biography, Kafka: The Early Years, takes a look at the period between birth and early adulthood, encompassing Kafka’s childhood struggles for recognition within his family, his […]
Dan Simmons’ The Terror
by on April 16, 2018
In 1845, two ships, the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, set out from Britain as part of a naval expedition to discover and chart the Northwest Passage, a sea route connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans via the Arctic Ocean. […]
Oriana Fallaci’s The Rage And The Pride
by on April 12, 2018
In Europe, the late Oriana Fallaci needs no introduction, but North American readers might benefit from a primer: she was a member of an Italian resistance movement during the Second World War; a celebrated journalist, whose coverage of the Vietnam […]
Edward St. Aubyn’s Some Hope
by on April 10, 2018
It occurred to me only retrospectively that the third book in Edward St. Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose series is the first to employ a sincere title. The first book, Never Mind, culminates in the rape of the young Patrick Melrose by his […]
Christopher Lasch’s The Culture Of Narcissism
by on March 31, 2018
One of the surest signs of impending old age manifests itself as a frustration with modern culture and a conviction that not only film and music were better in some halcyon past, but people, too. By that standard, I have […]
Edward St. Aubyn’s Bad News
by on March 30, 2018
Bad News, the second of Edward St. Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels, gives us our first glimpse of the titular protagonist as an adult. He is in his mid-twenties now, and rapidly blowing through a large inheritance to feed an extravagant […]