Word: novels
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...killed Hamilton? The closer the novel comes to its conclusion, the more crowded it becomes with possible solutions. The murderers are multiple, the motives numberless, the conspirators legion. Obeysekere fails to grasp a truth mastered by all these writers in different ways: that mystery is not the fate of the unfortunate few; it's not confined to stormy nights and remote houses and crime scenes. It is the condition in which we live, and sometimes the all-knowing detective arrives too late to wrap up the loose ends or not at all. "Time never simplifies--it unravels and complicates...
Wallace, who hasn't put out a novel since his brilliant, dense Infinite Jest in 1996 (or any other fiction at all in five years), takes it easy on the reader here. Sure, his three-page-long sentences can make Faulkner look like Hemingway, and even short sentences can require four trips to the dictionary, but he has dropped his numbered footnotes, has cut down on the math formulas and tells linear tales nearly grounded in reality. This is as close as the guy is going to get to beach reading...
...Beckettian humor and science-fiction-height ideas portrayed vis-a-vis slow, realistic stream of consciousness. In an effort to make his often bizarre endings more powerful, Wallace frequently stops stories before their climax, which sometimes improves them and sometimes makes them seem like an aborted attempt at a novel. When it works, it's part of his Pynchonesque trick of keeping the reader uncomfortable by withholding information and embedding the most devastating facts within long descriptive paragraphs...
...maybe it's time for him to move on to another locale, even if it's one where the pastis is not as good. In his new novel, A Good Year (Knopf; 287 pages), there's a distinct feeling of a writer going through the motions. This time Mayle's story involves the boutique wine industry, vineyards that produce just a few hundred cases a year, some of them going for tens of thousands of dollars. (For the record, France's largest exports are heavy machinery and transportation equipment, but what would you rather read about on the beach this...
...Perfect Human had been a novel, Von Trier might have demanded that Leth rewrite it as a comic book, a haiku, a recipe, an ad slogan and an epic poem--and that the letter e never be used. But it is a movie. So remake No. 1 must be filmed in Cuba and have no shot longer than 12 frames, or half a second. The location of remake No. 2 must be "the most wretched place in the world" (some might have said a Von Trier movie set, but Leth chooses Mumbai, formerly Bombay). When the filmmakers have a chat...