Much like the political noise that is sweeping our country right now there is a topic in the bookish world that tends to split itself into party lines. For some it is something they are proud of and shout from the rooftops. For others it is a personal failure and something they’d rather not talk about. I am referring, of course, to the decision not to finish a book or as many ... Read More...
The Madwoman Upstairs
It’s no secret that Catherine Lowell styles certain elements of The Madwoman Upstairs after Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. In fact, the novel’s protagonist, Samantha Whipple, is the last remaining descendant of the Brontë family after her father dies in an unexplained fire at their home. Now she’s at Oxford and her professor, Timothy Orville, is handsome and brooding. ... Read More...
An Untamed State
When Mireille Jameson returns to Haiti with her husband and infant son to visit her wealthy family she knows of the tensions between the island’s poor and its rich. What she cannot anticipate is that on their way to an afternoon at the beach a gang of men will stop their car, beat her husband and kidnap her at gunpoint. For almost two weeks these young men will hold her ... Read More...
All Things Cease to Appear
Last week I reviewed The Undertaking which is a marvelous read in that it allows the reader to fully revel in feelings of rage, disgust and retribution (which is necessary relief if you’re watching political news these days). This is not the case in Elizabeth Brundage’s novel All Things Cease to Appear. It is much more attuned to contemporary times, when even though a ... Read More...
The Tsar of Love and Techno
For art to be the chisel that breaks the marble inside us, the artist must first become the hammer. The Tsar of Love and Techno begins in 1937 Leningrad with a nameless censor. A man whose artistic skill is such that his sole purpose is to erase people deemed to be enemies of the state from any and all paintings and photographs in which they appear. His talent ... Read More...
The Undertaking: A Novel
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of novels set in Berlin in the midst of World War II. Novels that document the trampling of many people’s lives into oblivion. Author Audrey Magee does not go the route of the victim or the innocent bystander. Instead, in her novel The Undertaking we meet Peter Faber, a German soldier stationed on the Russian front who decides to take ... Read More...
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