We are chased into this life. We are chased by what we do to others and then in turn what they do to us. We’re always looking behind us, or worried about what comes next. Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison and Louise Erdrich form the holy trinity of contemporary writers for me. They each produce impeccable novels on a regular basis, featuring strong but very human characters who are dealing with complicated and heartbreaking situations, and usually ending with pain tempered by some small hope. Race, […]
Perception and Remembrance
The Blind Assassin is Margaret Atwood’s Booker Prize and Dashiell Hammet Award winning novel (2000) that spans the major events of the 20th century while telling the tragic story of the Chase sisters. It is an ingenious combination of history and mystery with love, infidelity, avarice, godliness, war and literary references woven deftly within. This is also a novel about women, class and perception, or misperception/blindness as the case may be. The novel is narrated by Iris Chase Griffen, daughter and wife of captains of […]
How should we live when the world is dying?
The Children of Men is a work of dystopian fiction with religious overtones. PD James steps out of her usual realm of detective novels/mysteries to ponder what happens to relationships (among people, between people and government, between individuals and God) when the end of the world is immanent. In 2021, it has already been 35 years since the last live human birth. For reasons that science has not been able to explain, humans worldwide have been unable to reproduce; they are simply no longer fertile. […]
Another Step on my Literary Walk of Shame
My literary walk of shame, i.e., the list of books I should have read a long time ago, seems to involve a lot of youth lit. I’ve never read any Nancy Drew books despite the fact that we had a stack of them in the closet when I was a kid. I didn’t read Little Women until I was 40. I just read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn last month. And now, at long last, I have read Madeleine L’Engle’s classic time travel novel A […]
Unlikeable Characters Make for a Very Good Novel
The House at the Edge of the World is a daring novel in that it dares you to care about a group of characters who are selfish, self-absorbed and angry, and who essentially stay that way throughout the story. Julia Rochester’s clever novel is the story of a family mystery and its slow unraveling. Our narrator Morwenna Venton tells us about the death of her father John, the strange map that her grandfather Matthew has spend a lifetime drawing, and her dysfunctional relationships with her […]
Big Brother is Watching
Author Basma Abdel Aziz was recently featured in a New York Times piece about Middle Eastern authors who are writing dystopian fiction. Aziz is a psychiatrist who counsels torture victims, and it seems that both her profession and her experience of the Arab Spring have informed her storytelling. Aziz has been compared to both Orwell and Kafka for reasons that will be obvious to readers of The Queue. This novel features an unnamed Middle Eastern city that has experienced political turmoil and rioting and is now ruled […]
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