Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire is more fun to read than just about any book I know. By “fun” I mean that it’s a lot more than funny, but, being a poem, plus a critical appraisal of a book (with copious footnotes), and a novel, all combined, it engages the reader — as one flips back and forth through its pages — in the same way a really great puzzle or a game does. [Read more →]
Evidence of its being possibly the finest novella of the 20th century, Thomas Mann’s Death In Venice has inspired more than a few offshoots: the gorgeous, haunting Visconti movie (with music of Gustav Mahler), the Benjamin Britten opera, the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s 2007 presentation of the ballet by John Neumeier, Robert Coover’s fantastical Pinocchio in Venice, most recently Geoff Dyer’s novel Jeff in Venice, Death in Varansari, plus various graphic novels and even murder mystery spin-offs.
Within the first few pages, you know you’re reading something special. [Read more →]
It’s always puzzled me that, at least in some forums, Joseph Conrad is seen as an adventure story writer, as though he wrote for teenage boys. Admittedly, some of his long stories like Youth, Nigger of the Narcissus, and Typhoon have incredible scenes of high adventure and action, but even these are great works of literature. His The Secret Agent, too, with a title that suggests all the elements that go with the spy genre, will surprise, but hardly disappoint, anyone picking it up for an enjoyable read. [Read more →]
A few weeks ago I recommended Carson McCullers’ stunning novella The Ballad of the Sad Café. Since then I’ve read her short novel Reflections in a Golden Eye, which is now my new favorite of her works. Like Ballad, Reflections is concerned with the grotesque, but while in the former work the main characters are physically grotesque, in the latter each of the six main characters is psychologically grotesque, each one a twisted character. [Read more →]
My last few columns have all dealt with pretty heavy stuff — time for a palate cleanser. Kurt Vonnegut fans know that Slaughterhouse Five may be his most famous, and even his best, book. But the most enjoyable, the funniest, the most original, and Slaughterhouse’s predecessor by 10 years, is the interplanetary space romp The Sirens of Titan. [Read more →]
Most of us have read or been obliged to read, by a high school English teacher or college professor, James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Many have read the indelible story collection Dubliners. Hardly any of us have got past the first few chapters of Ulysses, let alone the entire book (even if it was crowned No. 1 in Modern Library’s list of the 100 Best Novels back in 2003). But who among us has the intellectual fortitude (or masochistic compulsion) to get through all 628 pages of Joyce’s nearly impenetrable, nay, opaque final work, Finnegans Wake? [Read more →]
I like lists. Here’s one: Balzac, Dickens, Philip Roth, Haruki Murakami, Tolstoy, Conrad, Nabokov, Hemingway, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Shakespeare. These are my top ten authors calculated by the amount of time I estimate I have spent reading them. The winner going away is Honore de Balzac. [Read more →]
From time to time I will write about the short novel or novella. Over the last 100 years, American authors have written some of the finest novellas in any language. For authors like William Styron and Carson McCullers, their novellas, The Long March and The Ballad of the Sad Café respectively, are the best things they wrote. [Read more →]
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, the movie, as most people know, is based upon a short story of the same name by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Not one of his best, Fitzgerald’s story is relatively brief, a rather obvious playing-out of what he must have considered a clever idea — a life lived backwards. It’s written in the same fabulist mode in which he wrote several other stories. Two of them, “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” and “Oh, Russet Witch,” are two of my favorite short stories of all time. [Read more →]
Of the friends I’ve asked about this, those who have read any of Updike’s four Rabbit books have either read them all, including the novella in the story collection Licks of Love, or they stopped, as I did, with the second book Rabbit Redux. The last two novels of the tetralogy either seemed just too much more Rabbit to take, or too long, more than 1,000 pages combined, to consider making the investment. I fell into the latter category until Updike passed away last January. I’ve since read Rabbit is Rich, and will eagerly move on to Rabbit at Rest soon. [Read more →]
