Tag: novel
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Martin Amis, 61 today, on ageing
Read more: Martin Amis, 61 today, on ageingMartin Amis is 61 today. Happy birthday. Here’s his own take on ageing from his latest novel, The Pregnant Widow, published this year. Martin Amis – never amiss with words: This is the way it goes. In your mid-forties, you have your first crisis of mortality (death will not ignore me); and ten years later…
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Good old writers
Read more: Good old writersWho says old geezers can’t write? Some of them die with the sharpest minds. That’s certainly true of the literary critic Frank Kermode, who has just died at the age of 90. Reading about his death yesterday, I turned to his essays published in the London Review of Books. You can’t tell his age from…
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Amit Chaudhuri, The Immortals
Read more: Amit Chaudhuri, The ImmortalsIt’s been a long time coming. Except that Amit Chaudhuri wouldn’t have used those words sung by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. The gifted Indian writer,who teaches contemporary literature at the University of East Anglia, prefers Indian classical music. An accomplished singer himself, he pays homage to the music in The Immortals. Now don’t let…
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A Truth Universally Acknowledged: About Jane Austen
Read more: A Truth Universally Acknowledged: About Jane AustenJaneites will love A Truth Universally Acknowledged, a collection of essays by 33 famous writers and critics acknowledging the genius of Jane Austen. Her admirers will have the pleasure of discovering their feelings shared by writers like Virginia Woolf, EM Forster, Somerset Maugham, CS Lewis, JB Priestley, Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, David Lodge and critics…
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William Golding tried to rape 15-year-old, made schoolboys fight
Read more: William Golding tried to rape 15-year-old, made schoolboys fightWill the Lord Of The Flies author William Golding now be remembered as a would-be rapist, asks the Guardian. Golding, who won the Nobel Prize in 1983, three years after bagging the Booker for Rites Of Passage, admitted trying to rape a 15-year-old schoolgirl when he was an 18-year-old student at Oxford, according to a…
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The Singapore Grip
Read more: The Singapore GripThe Singapore Grip by JG Farrell Anyone who loves Singapore should read The Singapore Grip by JG Farrell. He won the Booker Prize in 1973 for The Siege of Krishnapur about the 1857 War of Indian Independence. The Singapore Grip is also a historical novel, describing Singapore at the time of the Japanese invasion during…
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Le Carre’s Most Wanted Man
Read more: Le Carre’s Most Wanted ManA Most Wanted Man by John Le Carre John Le Carre hates the “war on terror” and sympathizes with its victims. But he has let his feelings get the better of his art in A Most Wanted Man, for sympathy alone cannot animate the title character. Issa Karpov doesn’t come to life like George Smiley.…
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The Widows of Eastwick
Read more: The Widows of EastwickThe Widows of Eastwick is a reminder of the extraordinary talent of John Updike. He died last month of cancer at the age of 76. This is his last book, published last year. But this doesn’t read like the work of an old man. It has all the zest for life and interest in sex…
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Updike’s Terrorist and adulterers
Read more: Updike’s Terrorist and adulterersThe Terrorist by John Updike India, not Iran, was the first to ban Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses shortly after it came out in September 1988, reminds the Observer. The then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress government banned the book under pressure from the opposition Janata Party. Both wanted the Muslim vote. It was only…
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Remembering Steinbeck
Read more: Remembering SteinbeckJohn Steinbeck died on this day in 1968 at the age of 66, six years after he won the Nobel Prize, which even he himself didn’t expect. Critical scorn When asked by a reporter whether he believed he deserved the prize, he responded, “Frankly, no,” says Robert Gottlieb. In a New York Review of Books…
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