Well, once again my blithe predictions return to haunt me. Alan Hollinghurst has in fact won this year’s Booker prize–actually the only novel on the list that I’ve read so far. To bluntly rehash my previous reservations about this book, it’s not bad, but it’s been ludicrously overrated. If you want to read a novel […]

I’ve just received Gerard Woodword’s “I’ll Go to Bed at Noon” in the post. Just what I need after AL Kennedy’s Paradise: another book about dysfunctional boozehounds. I look forward to sharing my opinions on the novel even if the words in the title above come to mind when I consider its likely fate at […]

I’m within 80 pages of the end of AL Kennedy’s Paradise, a novel narrated by Hannah Luckraft (a name that mingles hope with a presentiment of shipwreck), an alcoholic Scottish woman involved in a self-destructive relationship with a “dissolute dentist” (the fly-leaf’s description) Robert Gardener. It’s certainly not an easy read–as opposed to Consul’s lubricated, […]

In yesterday’s New York Times, Mark C. Taylor mounts a robust defense of Derrida, going as far to claim that:”Along with Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, who died last week in Paris at the age of 74, will be remembered as one of the three most important philosophers of the 20th century. No […]

I was struck more forcibly than I expected when I came across the headline in the New York Times: “Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies at 74“. The adjective bestowed on the deceased suggests a certain contempt that Derrida was held in by sections of the Anglophone academy. I remember seeing Derrida lecture to a packed […]

The New York Times calls Jelinek a “Fiery Austrian Writer” (reg required). Is the adjective “fiery” exclusively reserved for “difficult” females?

…that household name, Elfriede Jelinek! Well, at least I was half-right in my predictions, when I said that it was not unlikely that nobody among those mentioned as possibilities would actually win. After a perusal of Jelinek’s bio on the Nobel site, however, I was surprised to discover that I had a glancing, if indirect, […]

The biggest gong in writing, the Nobel Prize for Literature, is due to be announced tomorrow. The winners seem to oscillate between some Great Name whose major work is behind them (V.S Naipul, for example) and a figure few in the Anglophone world has ever heard off. (When Saul Bellow was awarded the prize in […]

Say what you like about Martin Amis’s novels–and most critics did when Yellow Dog was released last year–but his occasional journalism, the commissioned “colour” pieces usually contain a clutch of phrasings that reveal an aesthetic sensibility absent in most others’ hack work. In today’s Guardian, he finds an accommodating subject for his style in the […]

Faced with a situation in which beheadings are being streamed over the Internet and satellite television covers the collateral damage caused by “precision” bombing, the most improbable connections between technology and terror start to make sense.My example: last week I was working through an interesting title called “Object Thinking” by David West. West is a […]