Category: Fiction
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Vita Sackville West: Selected Writings edited by Mary Ann CawsPalgrave Macmillan, 2003 (Palgrave, 2002)
A mix of the very interesting and the less interesting. Wonderful: all of the short stories, the novella Seducers in Ecuador, with its shifts in perspective and pleasingly strange conceit, some of the poetry (lines about winter light, autumn color). These lines, from “The Quarryman”: “New shapes, new planes, undreamed by architect; An accidental beauty,…
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The Seas by Samantha HuntMacAdam/Cage, 2004
This book is watery and shifting and uneasy like the sea. It’s filled with wonderful small details: the grandfather who sets type and is composing a dictionary, the motel with rooms named after hurricanes, the big sprawling house that used to be apartments for sailors. A few moments seem too self-consciously literary: “‘You are the…
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Possession by A.S. ByattVintage International, 1991 (originally Chatto and Windus, 1990)
Oh, academia! I love how Byatt plays with genre, with the idea of romance in its various senses, with the chase/quest/race, with detective stories and novels and letters. I love how the texts that her characters are anaylzing are themselves a significant part of her own text: her protagonists are readers, and we have the…
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Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna ClarkeBloomsbury, 2004
The back cover quotes a review in the Washington Post proclaiming that this book is one of those that “are meant to be lived in for weeks.” It’s true, and not just because the hardcover edition is 800 pages. Clarke’s writing is urbane and beautiful and descriptive, very British and very wonderful. This book has…
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Lost in the Forest by Sue MillerKnopf, 2005
The world that Sue Miller creates in Lost in the Forest is a rich one, full of detail. Reading this novel, you can nearly see the slant of light over Napa Valley’s vineyards, the sidewalks and shop windows of a town that’s newly a tourist attraction. As family dramas unfold, Miller almost always perfectly captures…
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Grammar is a Sweet, Gentle Song by Erik OrsennaTranslated by Moishe BlackGeorge Braziller, 2004
A quick and charming fable about the value of words, and how we should use them. The whimsy of the details (especially near the end!) makes up for any overdone sentimentality or didacticism.
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The Good People of New York by Thisbe NissenKnopf, 2001
Thisbe Nissen writes well: there are moments in this book that are perfect: descriptions, sentences, thoughts. Her characters are quirky and smart, especially Miranda, but their stories are less compelling than they could be. Something in the tone of this book struck me as off, or off-putting: it’s narrated in a third-person omniscient style, and…