I was fourteen when I first read Robertson Davies’ Fifth Business, the first entry in his Deptford Trilogy and certainly one of the most acclaimed Canadian novels ever written. Davies was something of a Canadian institution, widely enough read in his day […]
Category » Book Reviews
True wit is Nature to advantage dressed,
What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed;
Something whose truth convinced at sight we find,
That gives us back the image of our mind.
-Alexander Pope
Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle (Book One)
It takes something approaching egomania to write a six-volume, 3500 page memoir when you’re barely 40 years old, and a rebellious indifference to propriety to borrow your title from one of history’s biggest egomaniacs, but the self-portrait emerging from Karl […]
Friedrich Schiller’s Essays
Friedrich Schiller was a German poet, philosopher and playwright, hugely influential in his day but far less widely read now, his star eclipsed by his contemporaries Goethe and Kant. His Essays, a posthumous cobbling together of his various writings on […]
Ian McEwan’s Saturday
At the heart of Ian McEwan’s Saturday is successful neurosurgeon and loving husband and father Henry Perowne, whose supremely rational worldview McEwan uses, almost excessively, as a springboard to incorporate into the narrative broader philosophical musings about concepts as varied as free […]
Jonathan Rauch’s Kindly Inquisitors
I came across Jonathan Rauch by accident when I stumbled upon a video of him defending free speech on behalf of F.I.R.E., the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a non-profit group established to defend civil liberties, particularly the freedom of […]
Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn
For a tiny island nation with a population under seven million, Ireland boasts more than its share of brilliant writers, from Swift down to Yeats, Shaw, Joyce, Beckett and the late Seamus Heaney. Is it inspirational scenery? or perhaps the […]
James Wood’s The Fun Stuff
In starting this blog, and in writing literary criticism more generally, I had in mind an ideal, a mode of writing to aspire to based on the critical writings that had given me the most pleasure. James Wood is that […]
Paul Harding’s Tinkers
Paul Harding’s first novel, Tinkers, was published in 2009 when he was 42 years old, a late start for a then-unknown graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, but no doubt he was gratified to find any publisher after the slew of early rejections. […]
Leo Damrosch’s Jonathan Swift
I have to begin by thanking my father for making a gift of this book. It was published just last year, in 2013, and I find myself amazed both at its reception – as I write this it stands in […]
Kingsley Amis’ The Crime Of The Century
I’m not sure how well-known Kingsley Amis is on this side of the Atlantic, particularly among my generation. His son Martin has achieved a much wider recognition in America, though his star is still highest in Britain. Both father and […]
George Saunders’ Tenth Of December
George Saunders’ latest short story collection Tenth of December was released early last year, to the kind of critical acclaim – “The best book you’ll read this year,” fawned a NYT critic in January – that inflates egos and bank accounts, and turns a […]
Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin
While searching for a publisher brave enough to put out Lolita, and laboring under the burden of financial necessity, Vladimir Nabokov published Pnin in installments in The New Yorker, and it has lived in the shadows ever since. It is, admittedly, a much less ambitious […]
Alexander Pope’s Selected Poems
In a letter to a friend, Alexander Pope wrote, “My life in thought and imagination is as much superior to my life in action and reality as the best soul can be to the vilest body.” The metaphor is general […]