Philip Roth passed away late last month, some six years after officially retiring from fiction writing, and the deluge of tributes and commentary, reflections and reminiscences, give some indication of what his life meant for American letters. America in the […]
Edward St. Aubyn’s At Last
by on June 10, 2018
The fifth and final book in the Patrick Melrose quintet takes place on the day of Patrick’s mother’s funeral. Up to this point, he has survived: being raped and abused, repeatedly, by his father; a lengthy heroin addiction, followed by […]
Edith Wharton’s The Age Of Innocence
by on May 29, 2018
In attempting to explain the sexual morality of the contemporary world to older family members – for whom Facebook and YouTube are mysteries, not to mention Tinder or Snapchat – I have often declared, in exasperation, that the dating world […]
Mordecai Richler’s Belling The Cat
by on May 24, 2018
My only personal connection to literary greatness is with Mordecai Richler, via my grandparents, who were friends and neighbours of his in the Eastern Townships, Anglophone Montreal’s quondam country retreat. As a child, I read personalized copies of his celebrated […]
J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting For The Barbarians
by on May 17, 2018
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. […]