One novel that includes two distinct and stunning novellas in the life of Jeff Atman. Jeff, of course, seems to be a thin disguise for Geoff. I have no idea how biographical these stories may be, but they read with a gripping authenticity.The title is more than a play on words for the Thomas Mann...
This was stage three of this month's Belligerati triathlon: the book (Roadside Picnic), the film (Stalker), and now the book about the film (Zona). Sounds like, as Dyer himself observes, "one wouldn't get far without the word meta cropping up and turning everything to dust." Yet it turned out to ...
How do you leave a mother who associates her life’s meaning and fulfillment to you and your achievements, without breaking her heart? How do you surrender all your passion to a lover while leaving some for the woman who gave birth to you, reared you, and loved you? Should a man give greater love ...
Sometimes the characters let you know what’s going on in THE COLOUR OF MEMORY by Geoff Dyer, like when one, a writer, explains that he never applies plot. Plot kills. This first novel kills, but not mortally, and, of course, it’s plotless. The other way Dyer pops into the narrative is by an aside...
"Head bowed, rifle on his back, a soldier is silhouetted against the going down of the sun, looking at the grave of a dead comrade, remembering him..." A poetic and impressionistic tribute to those who perished in World War I--and those who lived, haunted by their memories. "Brilliant--the Great ...
For as long as Walker could remember he had been disappointed by boats: something to do with the thickness of the metal, the size of the bolts; the way everything was covered in a thick skin of paint, the way you had to struggle through low self-closing doors, the way the toilets were always awas...
It should come after everything else, but I find that I don’t want things to end like that, as they did. Perhaps that is what led me to tell this story that is not a story: the chance to rearrange, alter, change; to make things end differently. The four of us remained extr...
If floorboards could speak these look like they could tell a tale or two, though the tales would turn out to be one and the same, ending with the same old lament (after a few drinks people think they can walk all over me), not just in terms of what happens here but in bars the world over. We are,...
So you must go to back of queue.’ ‘Sir, I am requesting you.’ ‘And your request has been categorically refused.’ In other circumstances I might have found this wearying, but I had been in India long enough, now, to realize that there is no limit to the number of times the same thing can be said. ...
There was a halo of mist around the moon. A light fog draped the iron skeletons of trees. Fireworks exploded green, red and yellow in the cool mist of the sky. The bandstand loomed stark and empty before us. Paths grew indistinct in the near distance. A rocket arced up into the sky and burst into...