Category Archives: Books

April 22, 2012 · 8:08 pm

A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters by Julian Barnes

Is it a novel?  Or is it a tapestry of 10 1/2 vignettes on the broad theme of discovery?  Barnes himself has said that ‘A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters’ was conceived as the former but I would be more inclined to agree with the latter.   The irony here is that the main themes of this book revolve around the idea of alternative perspectives … so perhaps we are both right.

Like Barnes’ other short stories (I reviewed his latest collection ‘Pulse’ last month), the ‘chapters’ are a mixed bunch and aside from repeated nautical metaphors, I’m not fully convinced that it hangs together all that well as a ‘novel’.  However, the opening chapter set on Noah’s Ark is pure satirical brilliance, and the 1/2 chapter ‘Parenthesis’ is beautifully written and is definitely Barnes at his best.  Perhaps I will only fully appreciate the book at a novel by re-reading it as a later date. Continue reading →

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April 18, 2012 · 3:50 pm

The Map and the Territory by Michel Houellebecq

It’s just as well that I don’t judge books by their covers because let’s face it, this cover of the hardback English language version of Michel Houellebecq’s ‘The Map and the Territory’ is pretty bad.  Happily, the contents are more rewarding as the enfant terrible of modern French literature has produced his most innovative work yet.  Perhaps more subtly provocative than his previous novels, ‘The Map and the Territory’ follows the story of Jed Martin, a French artist who discovers fame by taking photographs of Michelin maps and completing a series of portraits of people and their professions whilst dealing with personal crises such as his father’s illness.  Houellebecq includes himself as a fictional character in the book working on the text of Martin’s exhibition guide and his comical self-caricature is one of the most amusing aspects of the novel. Continue reading →

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April 15, 2012 · 10:04 pm

How To Be a Woman by Caitlin Moran

I am currently battling my way through a 3000 word essay for my French Feminism module about Julia Kristeva (word count so far: 1570). This is proving to be extremely tedious considering that Kristeva’s ideas are highly abstract and that a significant number of critics think that she might actually be anti-feminist given the lack of attention she gives to female subjects in her work about semiotics, psychoanalysis, linguistics and a bunch of other crap that I don’t really understand at all.  So it has been a real breath of fresh air to read Caitlin Moran’s memoir/rant ‘How To Be a Woman’ which feels like the first properly feminist book I’ve read this semester.  I find it faintly ridiculous that the majority of feminist theorists do not write books that are either helpful for women, relevant to women or even really about women.  Moran, however, is a revelation.  ‘How To Be a Woman’ is not an academic thesis and there are few references to ‘global’ political issues such as equal pay, but it does address the real everyday experiences of being a woman.  And by that I mean menstruation and knickers.  It is a funny and honest account about growing up and how to cope with the trials of weddings, rubbish boyfriends, wearing high heels and giving birth.  Ok, so this isn’t exactly new stuff, but I think it is refreshing to see a readable feminist ‘manifesto’ that actually has some relevance to the real world for once. Continue reading →

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April 13, 2012 · 6:23 pm

The Human Stain by Philip Roth

This week I’ve been reading ‘The Human Stain’ by Philip Roth which has taken me a fair amount of time to read and also a fair amount of time to absorb its impact.  I don’t know if it was the long-winded sentences and paragraphs or just the sheer intensity of the writing, but I really had to concentrate and couldn’t have any distractions in the background while reading the book which I found was impossible to read on public transport.  The story of Coleman Silk, a retired Classics professor, who has lived his life as a non-religious Jew but is in fact a Negro would probably come across as faintly ridiculous at best in the hands of any other author but Roth manages to sustain the powerful and compelling narrative with incredible control.   Although I sometimes found Roth’s prose a little too sprawling, ‘The Human Stain’ is still a more rounded work than ‘American Pastoral’ and would have lost none of its power with a little more editing as the tone of rage would still positively radiate from the page.  It is a beautifully angry story: certainly not an easy novel to read but it is still guaranteed to stay with you for some time.

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March 28, 2012 · 3:46 pm

Julian Barnes

Just like I wrote a blog entry about Haruki Murakami without having read ‘1Q84’, I will today be writing about Julian Barnes without having read ‘The Sense of an Ending’.  Forgive me if I’m rarely up-to-date with anything.

Saying that, this week, I have read Barnes’s most recent collection of short stories ‘Pulse’ as well as his debut novel ‘Metroland’ first published some thirty years ago.  ‘Metroland’ is a coming-of-age story set in London and Paris in the 1960s and 1970s which has some nice touches of subtle irony and acute observations about youth and relationships even if the meandering plot resulted in somewhat less developed characters.  This is probably why I enjoyed reading ‘Pulse’ more as his perceptive wit seems to be more effective in the form of a short story.  Split into two parts, the stories are all in some way linked with wider themes of love and loss while the stories in Part Two each explore one of the five senses. The first and final stories in the collection, ‘East Wind’ and ‘Pulse’ respectively, were the most poignant while ‘Sleeping with John Updike’ was the most successful of his comic work.  The sequence of dinner-party conversations written entirely in dialogue, however, would surely have worked more effectively as scripts than short stories.  Overall though, ‘Pulse’ is an impressive collection which demonstrates Barnes’s exquisite versatility and perceptiveness.

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March 21, 2012 · 9:00 pm

Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami

Dance Dance Dance Haruki MurakamiLast summer, I set myself the slightly insane task of reading two novels a week purely for pleasure, in other words, not related to my degree course.   Originally, this ‘project’ was only meant to last for my sixteen week summer break and had been something I had been looking forward to for a long time as I had had only limited access to English language books when I was studying in Paris for a year (the time when I really should have started writing a blog).  I expected that I wouldn’t be able to continue the pace during term time.  However, nearly ten months later, possibly at the expense of getting a decent result in my degree, I am still managing to read two novels a week, having possibly borrowed more fiction from the university than the non-fiction I am supposed to be reading for my course.  Some people ruin their degrees by drinking too many Jagerbombs at toga parties.  I, however, may ruin my degree by spending too much of my time reading 653 page novels by Jonathan Franzen instead of journal articles about political analysis.  And if my blogging word count starts getting higher than my project word count…well, that’s when I’ll know I have a bit of a problem. Continue reading →

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