Category: Fiction

As its title says, this book features Tintin—yes, the character from the comics by Hergé—but not Tintin of the comics exactly, not quite. It’s a funny book, and satisfyingly allusive; the language is often overblown but it works. At the book’s opening Tintin is bored of Marlinspike, of the winter weather keeping him indoors, of…

This book is sprawling, encyclopedic, full of lists, and wonderful. It’s the story of the life of a Paris apartment building, but seen with the focus of an elderly inhabitant, the painter Valène, who’s decided he wants to make a painting of the building and the people who live in it. The opening epigraphs, by…

Cara Wall’s at the center of this book, except her presence is also an absence: she’s dead, so her voice isn’t here, only in snippets of remembered conversations, or imagined ones. Her girlfriend reading the death notice she’s put in the newspaper: W A L L, suddenly, Cara, beloved daughter of Ian and Winona. How…

Beautiful images: a “vast inkwash world of cloud and rain shot through diagonally with a thousand silver arrows,” the blue of a celadon plate, the yellow of mustard-blossoms. A journey in vignettes and inaction: a painter walks through the mountains, stays at an inn with a hot spring, flirts with the daughter of the innkeeper,…

This novel’s funny moments, and there are a fair number of them, are very funny. The narrator’s a slacker named Shane who steals saltshakers, temps at an insurance agency, sleeps with his landlord’s wife, is dating a woman who beats him up in bed repeatedly. He seems to spend a lot of time at his…

Yambo wakes in a fog: he’s lost his episodic memory, though his semantic memory remains. He speaks in stock phrases and quotations; he remembers lines of poetry but not his own life. And so he returns to his childhood country house to try to remember who he is, digging through boxes of notebooks, records, and…

When Dickens is sentimental or moralizing, things drag; it’s hard not to roll one’s eyes. I was trying to articulate, the other day, what I found off-putting about this book: the plot twists that feel manipulative, the way the characterizations are so black and white, morally speaking. But there’s plenty that’s good too: plenty that’s…

I read a post about The Nature of Monsters over at A Work in Progress a few months ago, and that description of the bookseller’s shop that Danielle quotes was enough to make me want to read it. I like how gripping the story is, and the boldness of its heroine, and of course I…