My favorite kind of magical story - the kind that holds matter of fact magic, the sort of magic that could actually happen if you just know how magic works (believe in it and don't think too much about it and accept it when it appears without question). Adults tend to forget how to do it and, sc...
Just finished this book, and loved it. Started off dark, as my daughter, put it -- I read the first few paragraphs to her -- but it is after all set in the far North. It's a mythical story of a shaman named John who must embark on a journey to get the world-songs for his soon-be-born daughter, ...
Pilgermann, long dead – a spirit consisting of waves and particles – contemplates the vicissitudes of being…“As far as I could see, the will of God was simply that everything possible would indeed be possible. Within that limitation the choice was ours, the reckoning His. And He was in us, one co...
I read this for my current MFA work, so my review is more from a writer's craft perspective. Below is a cut and past from a response paper. The Japanese Kanji that I put in to illustrate some things will be (is) lost.Despite the author’s protestations to the contrary, this is classic—nearly arch...
Kleinzeit, Russell Hoban's second novel, is probably the funniest of his books. It's a stylized, completely unpredictable story about a man in search of reality, armed only with a Glockenspiel and a copy of Thucydides' The Peloponnesian War. The story opens as our hero, Kleinzeit, experiences a ...
The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz starts out in the style of a fairy tale or myth, which tends to irk me: real fairy tales and myths are stories worn smooth by a hundred thousand retellings over the course of centuries, which is how they get their primordial feel. Attempts to copy that feel...
What a charmer!This is exactly the sort of novel that I find myself groaningly -- nay, head-strikingly -- slogging through, page after page, in a fruitless quest for plot or message. Typical first-novel junk: a blocked writer, who cannot get over the decade-old loss of a woman, is pushed into the...
Recently widowed and increasingly lonely, Roswell's life had arrived at the point when he felt he needed a tattoo. His ideal image was that of a bat featured on an 18th-century bowl in the Victoria and Albert Museum, but strangely, on a visit to the museum, he encountered a woman called Sarah, wh...
On 4 November 2052 Fremder Gorm is found drifting in space a few megaklicks off Badu, a planet in the Fourth Galaxy. He is the only survivor from Clever Daughter, a battered old tanker. Why did Fremder survive?
This is a sort of coming-of-age novel, except that the protagonist is in his seventies. So maybe it's a going-of-age novel. Throughout his life, Harold's inner voice, his thinking voice, has occured in words. One day, he loses his inner voice, or rather, it becomes an outer voice. He can't think ...
Phil Ockerman falls for Bertha Strunk at a tango lesson in a church crypt in Clerkenwell. Each recently separated, both their Suns are squared by Neptune. Bertha also bears a strong resemblance to the 17th century Venetian singer and composer, Barbara Strozzi with whom Phil is obsessed.
How do they not think about the sharks when they’re swimming that 1,400 miles? Green turtles must have the kind of mind that doesn’t think about sharks unless a shark is there. That must be how it is with them. I can’t believe they’d swim 1,400 miles thinking about sharks. Sea turtles can’t shut ...
I went to bed and the next thing I knew I was awake again and it was getting on for ten o’clock in the morning. Ring, ring, said the telephone, ring ring. Seize him. ‘I’m right here,’ I said. ‘I’m tired of running. Here I stand.’ ‘I have a call for you from Sol Mazzaroth,’ said Lucretia. ‘Yes,’ I...
All in a jangle of tintinnabulation: Dad gone; Berkeley; Michael; Mom’s death. She’d boasted of being out for a good time but without the constant excitement of her ongoing war with Dad the future was too much for her to swallow and she got cancer of the oesophagus. So why did I buy the gallery? ...
We hadn’t been around to Hermes Soundways since Fallok’s death, so that was where PS Locke and I went next. Bingo, there were two people inside, Irving Goodman and a woman whom I hadn’t seen before. When Locke knocked they had to open, and when I’d identified myself to the woman I said, ‘Now then...