Posts filed under “reviews”.
reviews
Borderliners by Peter Høeg
Oscar Humlum and I had been travelling companions for a long time before we met, though without knowing it.
There was nothing strange about this. It was perfectly normal. Because, for an orphan in Denmark, everything was very strictly regulated. Across the country ran certain tunnels that were invisible; they ran alongside each other, absolutely parallel. So, when Humlum and I met, we did not talk much about the past. This silence – it was so as not to pry, but also because we knew that, in a way, we had been travelling together, even though we had not seen one another.
Runaway by Alice Munro
She just smiled, the same old Tessa. And I asked how she was – you always do that when you see her, seriously, because of her long siege of whatever it was that took her out of school when she was around fourteen. But also you ask that because there isn’t much else to think of to say, she is not in the world that the rest of us are in.
Joseph O’Neill on Beckett’s Letters
We also learn of pulled teeth, dry pleurisy (“I feel all right except for a reluctance to sneeze & belch”), intestinal pains, boils and — brace yourself — “a sebaceous cyst in my anus, which happily a fart swept away before it became operable.”
Winged with Death – a reader’s impression
Before I’d started the book, I’d been expecting the theme to be of motion, but of course time’s impossible to disentangle from the dance of movement. It all tied in so wonderfully well with the central metaphor of the tango, a dance like so many others I’d only known performed by folk with painted shark grins and eyes dazzling like splintered marbles on COME DANCING. The sense of leading a dance and being led in one was a wonderful metaphor for the whole of the book. It’s a fleet narrative, the steps falling into place seemingly effortlessly; and the descriptions of the dance moves, all so wonderful — at times I’d to read them twice, forcing myself away from the narrative, just so I could enjoy the felicity and economy in the writing.
Netherland by Joseph O’Neill
What do you do when your wife takes your child and leaves you alone in a city of ghosts?
Hans van den Broek chooses cricket . . .
