Book notes

Category: Fiction

  • The Magicians by Lev GrossmanViking, 2009

    Quentin Coldwater is seventeen, smart, and not particularly happy. Not that he has too much to complain about: “I am a solid member of the middle-middle class,” he tells himself. “My GPA is a number higher than most people even realize it is possible for a GPA to be” (p 5). But he can’t help…

  • Proust, again: The Captive

    After a several-month break from Proust, I’ve started reading The Captive and am reading slowly,—even more slowly than I usually read Proust, now that I am bicycling to work a few days a week and therefore don’t have 35 minutes of reading-on-the-train time built in at the start and end of my day. I will…

  • The Winner of Sorrow by Brian LynchDalkey Archive, 2009 (originally New Island Books, 2005)

    Before starting this book I didn’t know much about William Cowper, just that Veda Hille uses bits of Light Shining out of Darkness in a song called “Cowper’s Folly.” Also, back in April, someone taped the whole text of “Light Shining out of Darkness” to a column in the Canal Street subway station, and despite…

  • The Rider on the White Horse by Theodor StormTranslated by James WrightNew York Review Books, 2009 (translation orginally 1964)

    Until the last story, which is the title story and the last that Storm wrote, I wasn’t enraptured by this book. Each story had its satisfying bits, but mostly they were too self-consciously stories, too concerned with doomed love, too nostalgic. But I liked this, from “In the Great Hall,” the last bit especially: [she]…

  • The Little Stranger by Sarah WatersRiverhead Books (Penguin), 2009

    This is the story of crumbling house in Warwickshire, the family who lives in it, and a doctor, whose first name we never learn, who finds himself increasingly entangled with the family’s affairs. It’s a story about class tensions, and also a ghost story, quite creepy and hard to put down, but at the same…

  • The rest of Sodom and Gomorrah

    The rest of Sodom and Gomorrah, after the long middle section, carries on swimmingly: it’s that usual Proustian mix of beautiful observed detail plus funny observed society-life plus jealousy and falling in and out of love and acting more or less foolish about it. There is much about sleep and time and memory and habit:…

  • Sodom and Gomorrah, still

    “The faithful” of the “little clan,” as the regulars at the Verdurins’ Wednesday-evening salon are known, have shifted a bit over the years since Odette and Swann were part of the group, and even those that are familiar faces from Swann’s Way may have changed a bit..but not too much. Dr. Cottard is no longer…

  • More of Sodom and Gomorrah

    To pick up where I left off, in the middle of Part Two: “The Intermittencies of the Heart” is sad and sweet and lovely. In this section, our narrator arrives at Balbec and suddenly, a year after the fact, the sorrow and loss of his grandmother’s death are real to him, start affecting him in…

  • Proust, in progress

    In the past I’ve only written here when I’ve finished reading something, but Proust is such slow going, and there is so much I want to write about, and this volume is so different from one section to the next. So here goes. Part One: Sodom and Gomorrah is, as you might guess, gay gay…

  • The Thirteenth Tale by Diane SetterfieldAtria Books, 2006

    This is a story of neo-Gothic intrigue, the story of a decaying pile of a mansion and the falling-apart family that lives in it, a story of reading and writing. In the first few pages I decided it had a few things going for it: the reference to The Water Babies (yay classic kids’ books)…