Month: December 2006
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When We Were Orphans by Kazuo IshiguroAlfred A. Knopf, 2000 (originally Faber and Faber)
Narrative restraint; a narrator who’s unreliable because memory is unreliable, and memory that’s unreliable for so many reasons —distance, pride—and what happens when that unreliability affects everyday events, when it affects what happens now and not just how we remember things. This is an elegant book, a quiet book, also perhaps a sad book, in…
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Venice from the Ground Up by James H.S. McGregorHarvard University Press, 2006
I read about this book in a post on Harvard University Press’s blog, and I was immediately won over by the old map and by that first paragraph. The book as a whole is pleasing, but not quite as pleasing as that first paragraph made me hope it would be. It’s a very well-produced book,…
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Grief Lessons: Four plays by Euripides, translated by Anne CarsonNew York Review of Books, 2006
I like the lucidity of Carson’s prose, the framing essays around these plays, and the prefaces to each one: the sense of knowledge and ease and also a sly smile when she writes things like “The first eight hundred lines of the play will bore you, they’re supposed to.” The four plays: Herakles, Hekabe, Hippolytos,…
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District and Circle by Seamus HeaneyFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006 (originally Faber and Faber, 2006)
I like the rhythm and shape of Heaney’s poems, the solidity of them. Especially pleasing: the first-day-of-school details of “The Lagans Road,” the three parts of “Out of This World.”
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The Lights Go On Again by Kit PearsonViking, 1993
This is the last book in the trilogy that begins with The Sky Is Falling, and it’s as pleasing as the first one was. As the war in Europe comes to an end, Canada’s “war guests” start to return to England. Norah and Gavin wonder when their turn will come: Norah’s excited, but Gavin, who…