Right up to the structurally equivalent point in The Stranger’s Child (2011) – that is, over the course of four substantial novels and a good chunk of the fifth – fragmentation played little part in Hollinghurst’s fictional world. Discontinuity was what his style existed to banish or perhaps redeem. His achievement was to find a way of writing that could accommodate promiscuous sex, the experience of watching Scarface and the use of Ecstasy on the same plane as evocations of Whistler’s brushwork, Henry James’s prose or Frank Lloyd Wright’s way with a building. This was a sensibility that seemed not to recognise a separation between high and low, past and present, glory and disgrace.. Thursday is really my "weekend" - I need to make up ground and actually write my overdue essay on the footnote, but it is a very tempting idea just to spend the day reading Hollinghurst's latest and the new Philip Pullman installment....
Showing posts with label days off. Show all posts
Showing posts with label days off. Show all posts
Thursday, October 19, 2017
Cheap effects
At the LRB, Adam Mars-Jones on Alan Hollinghurst's latest novel and literary career more generally:
Saturday, March 10, 2012
Light reading catch-up
I hadn't really intended to, but in effect I am clearly taking the weekend off (tomorrow I have ambitious exercise plans and am also meeting my dad for lunch and the matinee of Nico's ballet)....
Finally had time to read some novels, soothingly!
Edward St. Aubyn's At Last is pretty amazing; I like the aphoristic mode here better than the mode of more profound commentary, but these Patrick Melrose books really are a must-read (and as I said, I think the opening chapter of this one may be the single best novel opening I've read in recent memory).
I considerably enjoyed Anya Lipska's Where the Devil Can't Go, a crime novel about Polish immigrants in London (a good recommendation from Maxine!); Sharon Shinn's Troubled Waters is what my grandmother, speaking disparagingly of certain kinds of sliced bread, would have called 'pap,' but highly readable pap; S. G. Browne's Breathers: A Zombie's Lament is absolutely wonderful (thanks to Jared for the recommendation); Robert Harris's The Fear Index is goofily heavy-handed in its Frankenstein parallels but certainly a page-turner.
Bonus link (FT site registration required, but it's more interesting than what Harris tells us about finance!): school for quants.
Finally had time to read some novels, soothingly!
Edward St. Aubyn's At Last is pretty amazing; I like the aphoristic mode here better than the mode of more profound commentary, but these Patrick Melrose books really are a must-read (and as I said, I think the opening chapter of this one may be the single best novel opening I've read in recent memory).
I considerably enjoyed Anya Lipska's Where the Devil Can't Go, a crime novel about Polish immigrants in London (a good recommendation from Maxine!); Sharon Shinn's Troubled Waters is what my grandmother, speaking disparagingly of certain kinds of sliced bread, would have called 'pap,' but highly readable pap; S. G. Browne's Breathers: A Zombie's Lament is absolutely wonderful (thanks to Jared for the recommendation); Robert Harris's The Fear Index is goofily heavy-handed in its Frankenstein parallels but certainly a page-turner.
Bonus link (FT site registration required, but it's more interesting than what Harris tells us about finance!): school for quants.
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