January 2012
2 posts
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Permit me to set the scene: Britain, spring of 2011. Her Majesty’s subjects were enjoying the warmest April for 350 years while psyching themselves up for the looming nuptials of Kate and Wills, little aware that in an office in Wapping, the Sun’s Gary O’Shea—single-handedly playing Woodward and Bernstein’s roles in the historic proceedings—was preparing to eclipse Royal Wedding fever with...
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Readers of a prudish disposition—and I know there are many of you—will be relieved to hear that in each month’s portrait, Amy’s modesty is fully maintained with bits of lace or fabric; as she often mentions, elegance and refinement are her bywords. “I didn’t do it because I wanted to get them out all the time,” she has said of her decision to acquire silicone implants, “I just thought it would...
December 2011
1 post
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What with the sex scandals, the fondness for classical allusions, and the irrepressible wisecracking, Mayor Bloomberg’s London counterpart is what you might politely call a politico in the European tradition—so naturally it’s time for him to take his rightful place alongside Jordan et al in my Awl guide to the most important UK celebs.
November 2011
2 posts
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Dora’s own doctorly ambitions were thwarted by her father, who was of the firm opinion that studying medicine ‘would ruin her eyes, her looks, her reproductive health and any prospect of a settled future’, so she’s only too pleased that her duties for Dr Kemble extend well beyond typing and filing. In her first week she’s posing as the ‘alley murder’ victim while the doctor tears at her blouse...
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It's Jordan's World, We Just Live In It →
October 2011
3 posts
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All of which sordidness brings us vis-à-vis with a question of such pressing national import, one hopes that a special parliamentary committee is as we speak convening to address it: why oh why does adorable, salt of the earth Coleen, now 25 and the mother of baby Kai, stay married to the faithless Wayne, said to possess all the charm of a root canal and by popular consent no oil painting?
...
Don't You Wish You Looked Just Like Cheryl Tweedy? →
My Russian Grandmother and Her American Vacuum Cleaner, a witty and charming memoir by Israeli author Meir Shalev, commemorates one indomitable woman’s fight against dirt in the promised land. (It’s also the second book I’ve reviewed in as many weeks that goes inside the mind of a horse, an opaque message from the universe if ever there was one.)
September 2011
3 posts
In Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s new novella, The Truth About Marie, a narrator who’s unreliable, avowedly omniscient, and endowed with a preternatural gift for language is buffeted by fate, and his own mind, between Tokyo, Paris, and Tuscany. I loved it.
In which I ponder a question for the ages: who is... →
August 2011
1 post
My Words Without Borders Review of "The Hypnotist" →
Chilling suspense + umlauts = literary pb&j
June 2011
1 post
Will the French sex scandal-strewn fallout of DSK’s rape charge have any effect on America’s embarrassingly obvious crush on Paris? As I contend at The Awl, not if the publishing industry has any say in the matter.
May 2011
2 posts
Just when you and Anna Chapman thought that female spies couldn’t achieve greater cultural relevance, one of history’s most famous honey-trap victims is back in the headlines. Please follow me to The Awl, so I can tell you all about it.
April 2011
2 posts
A wildly misspent youth isn’t a surprising basis for a memoir — except when, like Darina Al-Joundi, the author grew up in Beirut and was as familiar with Kalashnikovs, corpses, and warships as cocaine, nightclubs, and anonymous sex.
If you’re one of those cynical people who expects an inversely proportional relationship between the brilliance of a book and the commercialism of its publisher, then The Explosion of the Radiator Hose by Jean Rolin (Dalkey Archive Press), about which I rave at WWB, won’t do a thing to change your mind.
March 2011
3 posts
Does The Tiger’s Wife — the debut novel by 25-year-old, New Yorker 20-under-40 author Téa Obreht — justify its hype? IMCO, pace Michiko Kakutani, not even close.
November 2010
1 post
Journey Into the Past by Stefan Zweig
In his memoir, The World of Yesterday, published the year after his suicide in 1942 at age 60, Stefan Zweig wistfully recalls the sense of security that “made life seem worthwhile” and that defined his parents’ and grandparents’ generation. Pre-WWI Europe, it seemed, was on an inexorably upward journey away from barbarism, whereas what came after proved to Zweig that his fellow Viennese Jew,...
September 2010
2 posts
Soul Searching in the Holy Land
Defining the slippery category of literary fiction is arguably a fool’s errand, not only because every so often someone (most recently, and most tediously, Lee Siegel) eagerly declares it dead, but because there’s inevitable disagreement over precisely which duties a novel must perform in order to qualify. Nevertheless, as that famous line about pornography goes, I know it when I see it, and...
The Science of Storytelling
Consider the beach-read blockbusters of Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult, who spring to mind thanks to their recent co-protest over the reviewing policies of the New York Times. Now imagine the exact opposite type of novel—unformulaic, thought-provoking, challenging to the reader’s intelligence, disruptive to the status quo, brimming with originality, flawlessly written—and you’ll begin to get a...
August 2010
1 post
Jean-Christophe Valtat's "03"
In Jean-Christophe Valtat’s dazzling English-language debut, 03, a lyric from The Smiths’ Nowhere Fast sums up the narrator’s attitude toward feelings: “And if the day came when I felt a natural emotion / I’d get such a shock I’d probably lie / in the middle of the street and die.” This belief that emotions, ones worth having anyway, are the result of conscious decisions, “long and involved...
June 2010
2 posts
The Archaeologist
I can’t recall exactly when “overshare” entered our lexicon. It was voted Webster’s New World Dictionary’s spoken word of the year in 2008, but it was an Urban Dictionary word of the day back in 2005. One thing is obvious: over the past few years, the prevailing usage has narrowed to almost exclusively connote the behavior of a woman writer who, online or in print, exposes details of her personal...
"The Sexual Life of an Islamist in Paris" by Leïla...
As first lines go, that of Leïla Marouane’s second novel and debut in English, The Abductor (2000, translated by Felicity McNab), is a masterpiece of concision and intrigue: “My father lay helpless on the sofa while my mother was being joined to Youssef Allouchi in lawful wedlock.” Why, we wonder, is this man helpless while the mother of his children is being joined—the passive construction...
April 2010
2 posts
Martin Page's The Discreet Pleasures of Rejection
“I need a medical certificate saying that I’m alive so that they can turn the electricity back on at my place. It’s a long story.” So entreats Virgil, the hero of Martin Page’s sweetly amusing novel The Discreet Pleasures of Rejection, of his long-suffering shrink. Virgil is a navel-gazing thirty-one-year-old who lives in Paris, works as an advertising copywriter, and always dresses in corduroys,...
Purge by Sofi Oksanen
Aliide Truu, the warped murderess and tragic victim at the center of Sofi Oksansen’s astoundingly ambitious novel Purge, is an elderly woman when we meet her in the opening chapter. Living alone in the Estonian countryside in 1992, she has recently witnessed her nation’s liberation from Soviet rule, and is dealing with the challenges of life in a “dying village,” where everyone is moving away, no...
January 2010
1 post
The Patience Stone by Atiq Rahimi
In Afghanistan—where, eight years after the toppling of the Taliban by US and allied troops, women are still routinely arrested and jailed for “running away” or for adultery, where current law does not recognize the crime of rape, and where 70 to 80 per cent of marriages are forced—any woman who dares to speak out or attempts to affect change incurs at best abuse and threats, at worse death. “When...
November 2009
1 post
A Future Always Pure and Perfect and Remote
In 1876, a precocious fourteen year old named Edith Newbold Jones read George Eliot’s proto-Zionist masterpiece, Daniel Deronda, and roundly dismissed the character of Mirah Lapidoth, the young singer who defeats her shiksa rival/foil, the tempestuous Gwendolen, to marry the eponymous Daniel: “I don’t care for [those] pieces of faultlessness, like the good girls of such extravagant saintliness in...
October 2009
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The Goth Side of a Realist Master
In Being Human, the ne plus ultra of the now countless occult-themed TV shows glutting our airwaves, anyone can achieve vampiric immortality by imbibing a vampire’s blood at the precise moment of death. (“Let her drink from you!” one “supernatural” memorably begs of another as they stand over the hemorrhaging near-corpse of a mortal friend.) Read the rest @ The Second Pass.
September 2009
1 post
Review of The German Mujahid by Boualem Sansal
It’s common knowledge that, at the end of WWII, many German war criminals fled from justice via “ratlines” to South American countries. Less notorious, though, are the Nazis who, like the title character of Algerian novelist Boualem Sansal’s excoriating new novel, The German Mujahid, found permanent refuge in Arab countries such as Egypt, Syria and Algeria. Read the rest @...
August 2009
1 post
Review of The Most Beautiful Book in the World by...
Contemporary French literature outclasses all other nationalities when it comes to melding the popular and the profound, as epitomized by Annie Ernaux’s addictively cerebral TMI or Amélie Nothomb’s highbrow whimsy. Now Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt—a novelist and playwright best known outside of Europe for his novella Monsieur Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Koran, which became a movie starring...
July 2009
1 post
Little Girls Get Bigger Every Day
Gossip Girl’s running homage to the 1782 masterpiece Les Liaisons Dangereuses — or, more accurately, to the Upper East Side-set movie adaptation Cruel Intentions — is one of the show’s less guilty pleasures. The high school characters’ acumen in the finer points of sexual weaponry puts a genuinely subversive spin on their underage bed-hopping, drug-taking and old-money-fueled decadence. Read the...
June 2009
1 post
Review of A Girl Made of Dust by Nathalie Abi-Ezi
Writing literary fiction with a child’s point-of-view is not a job for the faint-hearted; to construct a compelling narrative with only a linguistically-limited and innocent voice as a conduit is a daunting challenge, one which few novelists have taken up and still fewer pulled off successfully. Read the rest @ Words Without Borders.
February 2008
1 post
Brother's Keeper
When he was fifteen, Philippe Grimbert was told by a cousin that he was Jewish, not Catholic, that he had a half-brother who died before he was born, and that his parents’ marriage was founded upon tragedy—the burden of which would ultimately lead to their suicide. Forty years later, in 2003, the psychoanalyst, who lives outside Paris, began work on an autobiographical novel about these...
November 2007
1 post
Lost Person: Gamel Woolsey
The poet and novelist Gamel Woolsey (1895–1968) was cursed with that shadowy defining quality of the greatest artists: the inability to coax life into satisfying her desires. Her ambitions for creative (to say nothing of romantic) fulfillment were continually, and almost comically, thwarted by fortune, and only through a bit of posthumous luck, and the efforts of friends who outlived her, do we...
October 2007
2 posts
Great Pretenders
On December 2nd, 1980, Romain Gary lay down in his Paris apartment, a synagogue-size menorah at the foot of the bed, and put a .38 caliber Smith and Wesson in his mouth. Seconds later, the life of one of France’s most celebrated and prolific novelists—a decorated war hero, globe-trotting diplomat, and notorious lothario—was over. But this was more than suicide: It was the final act of mythmaking...
Review of Sulphuric Acid by Amelie Nothomb
Never let it be said that Amélie Nothomb takes herself too seriously. At the end of The Book of Proper Names (2004) she gets murdered by her protagonist, Plectrude, having — in a characteristically mischievous flourish — entered the text to befriend her. “It’s the only way I’ve managed to get her to shut up,” Plectrude explains. Read the rest @ Flak Magazine.
May 2005
1 post
The Line of Beauty
Alan Hollinghurst’s fourth novel—just awarded England’s Man Booker Prize—is a scathing examination of the sexual, racial, and class fault lines of the Thatcher era as they converge in one young man’s life. Nick Guest, The Line of Beauty’s scholar-protagonist, comes bearing many youthful social fantasies and a symbolic last name. Read the rest @ New York.
March 2005
1 post
Extremely Similar and Incredibly Suspicious
Take a tragically dead father, a good-hearted but distracted mother, and a clever kid engaged in a mystery-solving quest around New York. Add weighty historical background, aging WWII survivors, some plot-driving letters/diary entries/manuscript fragments, and you have the constituents of not one novel but two: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer and The History of Love by...