Category: Fiction
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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…
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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:…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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)…
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Rock Crystal by Adalbert Stiftertrans. Elizabeth Mayer and Marianne MooreNew York Review Books, 2008 (originally Pantheon, 1945)
I thought I was in the mood for a wintry book, for prose with edges like mountains and ice, but maybe I wasn’t, or maybe I was but this wasn’t it. Having read W.H. Auden’s introduction, I knew the ending already, so I missed out on the “almost unendurable suspense” the back cover copy promises.…
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Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog by Dylan ThomasNew Directions, 1968 (originally New Directions, 1940)
Mmm Dylan Thomas. I’ve read Under Milk Wood a few times and like it a whole lot, so I’m not sure why it took me so long to read this. It is one of those perfect books of short stories where each story is exquisite, where each makes you want to pause after reading it.…
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The Invention of Everything Else by Samantha HuntHoughton Mifflin, 2008
It’s 1943 and Nicola Tesla is eighty-six and living in obscurity in the Hotel New Yorker: in this novel, a snooping chambermaid whose father’s best friend claims to have just built a time machine befriends him; he talks to the pigeons on his windowsill; the ghost of Sam Clemens writes Tesla’s biography. The New York…
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The Guermantes Way by Marcel Prousttrans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence KilmartinRevised by D.J. EnrightModern Library, 2003 (this translation/edition originally Chatto & Windus, 1992)
A central concern of this volume is the gap between what a name conveys to us and what the person who bears that name is really like: how the meanings of a name change from one time of our lives to another, and how all those successive meanings may hold little or none of the…