I really don’t like F Scott Fitzgerald – I’ve tried and tried but his gloomy view of the world and the people in it just gets me down. I got through three of his stories before I decided to give in and return the book to the library.
The Cut Glass Bowl: an upwardly mobile young couple receive a cut glass bowl as a wedding gift; it almost becomes a malevolent character in their lives, being somehow connected with a series of tragic events that alter the course of their lives
May Day: an unpleasant story of Yale graduates and their drunk partying and returning soldiers and their drunk rioting – a real event I think – and the shallow people caught up in between.
The Diamond as Big as the Ritz: a fantasy tale where John Unger is invited to a fantastically rich classmate’s home to discover the sinister and immoral origins of the wealth and the evil his narcissistic hosts will enact to preserve it. It’s an anticapitalist tale indeed.
Saturday, October 23, 2010
Solar by Ian McEwan
It’s interesting that a writer can choose such an unpleasant protagonist and yet have his reader so compellingly drawn into the narrative of this character’s life.
Solar is about a physicist, Michael Beard, a brilliant, womanising, cheating liar who nevertheless has a certain smarmy and superficial charm about him that initially draws people in.
The story charts the course of more than a twenty years, as he navigates his relationships with wives and lovers while developing new solar power technologies.
Like most of McEwan’s books, Solar is uncomfortable, squirmy reading. He is an acute observer of the everyday details of life and he uses them to build an excruciating picture of this awful man and his behaviour.
I think McEwan is a genius. He focuses on moments in people’s lives that are at the least uncomfortable and often very threatening – obsession, home invasion, suicide, lies and betrayals – and puts them under a sort of literary microscope using characters we all recognise from our own lives. I loved Solar.
Solar is about a physicist, Michael Beard, a brilliant, womanising, cheating liar who nevertheless has a certain smarmy and superficial charm about him that initially draws people in.
The story charts the course of more than a twenty years, as he navigates his relationships with wives and lovers while developing new solar power technologies.
Like most of McEwan’s books, Solar is uncomfortable, squirmy reading. He is an acute observer of the everyday details of life and he uses them to build an excruciating picture of this awful man and his behaviour.
I think McEwan is a genius. He focuses on moments in people’s lives that are at the least uncomfortable and often very threatening – obsession, home invasion, suicide, lies and betrayals – and puts them under a sort of literary microscope using characters we all recognise from our own lives. I loved Solar.
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
What a joy to have time to reread things. I can‘t actually remember when I did read this book first but the rereading was quite wonderful.
This story of the trial of a black man for the rape of a white girl is told through the innocent eyes of young Scout, daughter of Atticus Finch, the lawyer who is defending the man. Of course it is much more than this, indeed a portrait of southern American society in the 1930s from the ignorant ‘white trash’ families through to the old plantation families of the south with the black population caught somewhere in between.
You could write a thesis – and I’m sure it’s been written many times over – about what Harper Lee is saying in this book and I’m not even going to try to go into it here other than to say that essentially it is a story about being human, about being compassionate, and about the struggle that young people face when they are faced with the ugliness of people’s minds. Five stars, of course
This story of the trial of a black man for the rape of a white girl is told through the innocent eyes of young Scout, daughter of Atticus Finch, the lawyer who is defending the man. Of course it is much more than this, indeed a portrait of southern American society in the 1930s from the ignorant ‘white trash’ families through to the old plantation families of the south with the black population caught somewhere in between.
You could write a thesis – and I’m sure it’s been written many times over – about what Harper Lee is saying in this book and I’m not even going to try to go into it here other than to say that essentially it is a story about being human, about being compassionate, and about the struggle that young people face when they are faced with the ugliness of people’s minds. Five stars, of course
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)