A musician’s instrument is broken. He walks to the shop to buy a new one, but each one he tries sounds wrong. He travels across the country to buy another one, but when he comes home it still does not sound right. So he decides to die. Chicken with plums takes place in the eight days were he is waiting to die. He stays in bed thinking over his life, as his children, wife and family visit him to try to talk to him. Nothing […]
Beautiful prose, sexy twenties parties and all that jazz.
“No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.” Right, so the Great Gatsby. I‘m pretty much on a quest to re-read all the classics that I read as a teenager and never really got. The Great Gatsby is one of those romanticized novels that most people say is about Gatsby who’s hopelessly in love with Daisy. So much in love that even though she basically dumped him by telling him “Hey-yo I’ll be marrying someone […]
I think she’s part of another story.
I have been consistently conflicted about “The Dark Tower” series. Somehow, in spite of my frustrations, annoyances, aggravations, and declared boredom, I cannot put it down! This book, Book Four, Wizard and Glass, is a perfect example of this conflict: I am in love with the characters who come from “our” world: Eddie, Susannah, and Jake, the normals with whom, of course, we’re meant to identify, are the perfect hook for me. And then there’s sweet and loyal and probably brilliant, Oy, the billy bumbler […]
Throwing a kitten out a window was only a warning shot.
Halfway through Moonglow, I caught myself with my hand over my mouth, trying to keep my breath inside my body because the prose was so exceptionally beautiful. I had my worries before reading this book. I have only recently discovered Chabon, and have only otherwise read The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, which was so stunning that it made me want to punch something. There is a lot of hype surrounding Moonglow, and even I only got it by accident from the library on a strict, one […]
I’m a fountain of blood in the shape of a girl…
Patricia Engel has published two other books, the short story collection Vida and the novel It’s Not Love, It’s Just Paris. Even though I haven’t read either of those books, I felt that I needed to read her new novel, The Veins of the Ocean. Not only because the reviews were intriguing (and very positive) but also because I don’t remember ever reading anything by a Colombian American novelist. The Veins of the Ocean is the story of Reina Castillo. When we first meet Reina […]
About that time I included the words “Sperm Gargling” in a review
Here’s a bit of a literary quandary for you: can a book still be good if it deliberately skirts controversy, or does the artificially generated controversy only distract from the other qualities a book may have? I’ve been asking myself this ever since I read Wetlands, and I still don’t know. Wetlands, the debut novel of Anglo-German TV personality Charlotte Roche, tells the story of eighteen year old school girl Helen Memel. Helen is obsessed with her bodily fluids; her own and others’. She likes […]
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