“Talk about books” archive
This page links to current and recent posts (about a year’s worth). Posts up to and including 23 December 2021 can be found on the archive page for the first year of Talk about books and those from 2022 on the archive page for that year. And here is 2023.
21-Sep-2024
Shirley Hazzard’s short stories fall into two broad categories, those about working for the UN (“the Organization”), and those about men, women, relationships and social situations. This post is about the stories in the second category.
07-Sep-2024
Two novels about rural Ireland in the wake of the economic crash, published in 2011 and 2012 respectively, make for an interesting comparison both with each other and with Caoilinn Hughes second novel about which I’ve written before.
25-Aug-2024
Claire Kilroy published her fifth novel, Soldier Sailor, last year and it caused a stir. The three previous novels look like an unusually varied bunch but what they have in common (Faustian bargains, for a start) may come as a surprise.
10-Aug-2024
Melissa Bank’s two books look like collections of “linked short stories”, but the links are deeper and the stories or episodes more tightly integrated into an artistic wholeness than that might imply.
28-Jul-2024
Scott Turow’s third and fourth novels are where his practice of doing something different each time, avoiding formulae and patterns, first becomes conspicuous, and they come between the two which mark the high point of his work. One is darkly playful and mischievous, the other seriously ambitious.
14-Jul-2024
Several of the short stories in Mary Gaitskill’s second collection, originally published in 1997, deal with desires that may be incapable of fulfilment, and anyway will never be fulfilled. The title story is altogether more horrifying.
30-Jun-2024
A discussion, as yet unfinished, of some of Louis MacNeice’s poetry which deals with time and change, flux and stasis.
16-Jun-2024
A look at two poems by Robert Browning in which a first-person speaker, an approximate contemporary of the poet’s, addresses and interrogates through his music a long-dead composer (one of them fictional). I intend also to write about “Abt Vogler” and “With Charles Avison”.
01-Jun-2024
Though Hardy presents his heroine as a vivid, precisely drawn individual, she seems at the same time to span historical eras and periods and to bridge social positions and functions, and to represent the entire history of a wide geographical area.
19-May-2024
A look at three “city comedies” by Thomas Middleton, in which he works clever variations on a repeated set of themes, sets up the occasional coup de théâtre and demonstrates a surprising kind of humane (but not too humane) cruelty.
05-May-2024
A look at a lecture that Seamus Heaney gave while he was Oxford Professor of Poetry, in which he compared Philip Larkin’s “Aubade” with two poems by W B Yeats, to Larkin’s disadvantage.
21-Apr-2024
Salman Rushdie’s 2005 novel, Shalimar the Clown, is about Kashmir, the conflict between India and Pakistan over that region and the entanglement of public and private motives behind political (or terrorist) acts.
07-Apr-2024
The sixth anthology in Faber’s series of “New Irish short stories” contains 24 stories, ranging across a variety of themes and styles. I discuss four of my favourite stories from the volume, with brief notes on four more.
20-Mar-2024
The second of Caroline O’Donoghue’s 3 novels for adults features a filmmaker in her late 20s who visits her father’s birthplace on a small County Kerry island where, sixty years earlier, he was the only child to survive the disaster that killed his 18 schoolmates.
10-Mar-2024
Between 1987 and 1994, Candia McWilliam published 3 novels, none of them very long, which were critically very well received and won prizes. A collection of short stories followed in 1997. I’ve tried to assess the novels as a body of work.
25-Feb-2024
Paradise Lost reveals Milton’s philosophical materialism, while passing over the heretical beliefs which in part flow from it.
11-Feb-2024
A second look at Kate Atkinson’s series about an intermittently retired private investigator, looking in particular at the first book, Case Histories, which I couldn’t find and hadn’t reread when I wrote the first post.
28-Jan-2024
MacLaverty’s sixth book of short stories, the first for fifteen years, features many aging or elderly characters who are vulnerable to failing health and strength, bereavement and loneliness: threats that don’t always land where they’re most expected.
13-Jan-2024
Robert Browning’s monologue is more effective as drama if we don’t assume (a) that the subject of the painting is necessarily the Duke’s first wife, as well as his last, or (b) that his negotiations with the Count’s emissary end in success.
31-Dec-2023
Emma Healey’s two novels (to date) are quite different from each other but share some ideas and themes. Both focus on the relationship between sisters, and both gain a lot of their force from the idea of being buried or trapped underground in the dark and cold.
17-Dec-2023
Sylvia Townsend Warner’s collection of thirteen stories includes several which feature “strangers”, people who are in some sense out of place. Many of the stories have serious themes, some are more lighthearted but most have an element of often ironic humour.
03-Dec-2023
Jane Austen’s irony includes a kind of “double vision” which enables her to consider simultaneously “The economic basis of society” (W H Auden) and the wretched, wicked inadvisability of entering into a marriage “without affection”.
19-Nov-2023
I don’t know the poetry of Seamus Heaney (the tenth anniversary of whose death was earlier this year) as well as I ought to, and in this post I manage to prove that I don’t, though that wasn’t what I set out to do.
01-Nov-2023
This collection of 5 “long” short stories displays du Maurier’s versatility but without giving the impression that it’s a deliberate showcase or sampler. One story is spooky, one SF-spooky, one naturalistic adventure, one moralistic social satire and one mythological/mysterious.
22-Oct-2023
Salman Rushdie’s 1999 novel marks a change of direction in his fiction, though I’m not yet sure which way it leaves him pointing. He jokes about “disorientation” meaning “loss of the East”. It’s a novel about migration, earthquakes and rock music, and a love story.
04-Oct-2023
Lisa Lutz’s novel, The Swallows (2019) successfully performs a difficult balancing act. The theme is deadly serious — sexual exploitation and abuse — while the tone and style are often comic. That’s a mixture you might find in a savage satire — but this isn’t satire, exactly.