viragohaus's reviews
237 reviews

The Goldfinch does a number of things that a contemporary novel in the realist tradition is supposed to do. It immerses the reader in a close galaxy of incident and reaction, mirroring the close to the surface numbness of its skittish narrator with the bluntness of its prose. Why then does it read as utterly exhausted?

An essay collection, with the inherit ups and downs. You've probably already read the best pieces.

As a child, adulthood looked the greater prison making me at least in one sense the perfect reader for Exit, Civilian.
Idra Novey circles incarceration, only measuring out the cell when she knows its measurements.

On a day when purple wine soaked through a career not even half rung, Carson's clear-eyed fascination in the untranslated is purposefully turned to the stops and stutterings in Homer, Joan of Arc, Francis Bacon, Hölderlin and Paul Celan. The catastrophic inference in a war on cliche.

I only time I've lost a parent is at the betting shop so grief is not something that I know anything about. Wept buckets.

Published in 1933, this 2013 translation by Christine Schwartz Hartley and Anna Moschovakis is 'Commentary (a tale)'s first appearance in English. Fixed with the sharp gaze of unsent letters, Marcelle Sauvageot's novella is an emotionally bare, clear-eyed denouement.

With tenses sliding from present to just past to quite tense, this fragmentary telling of a marriage is an inventive take on a familiar story. Influenced by Adler's Speedboat and Nelson's Bluets, the cumulative effect makes me wonder if the saviour of literary fiction will be form, not story.

So redolent of speech that it's too perfect for speaking. Is that one of poetry's definitions?

Annabel Crabb calls Megalogenis an 'explainer' and I think that's exactly right. Like an umpire on a sport field, he has no interest in changing the field of play. Rather he wants to blow the whistle or ensure that he's in the right position to observe the reckless dash toward goal. Sometime compelling (particularly in his consideration of the 1970s), sometimes schoolmasterish (the dismissal), often interesting - this is likely to be the basis of the received version of our recent political history. For better and for worse.