MINDFUL PLEASURES

The Gothic elements of Rilke's Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge surprise and delight me. I didn't expect the poet of the Duino ...

Successful trash can be more memorable than unsuccessful art. I read Virginia Woolf's The Waves a little over a year ago and remember n...

Little Children isn't a bad book, but there's nothing terribly original here. It's a work of literary genre fiction, a 'nov...

The banal core of Jacques Derrida's philosophy can be represented by a STOP AHEAD sign: a sign referring to another sign that orders the...

One hidden precursor of Nabokov's Lolita is the 'suppressed' chapter of the Dostoyevsky novel translated variously as The Poss...

Melville's "Benito Cereno ," which I've finally gotten around to reading, is a brilliant, weird, original story, an unexpe...

It's difficult to romanticize or sentimentalize depression once you've seen its banality up close. For this kind of madness is indee...

"Fiction is essentially a means of deconstructing the aggregate fictions of a society."--E.L. Doctorow (sounding like Herbert Marc...

Ol ' Cormac's Pulitzer- and Oprah-winning The Road is a good literary horror novel with some brilliantly written passages (as one ...

Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year is very impressive, better than Elizabeth Costello and maybe as good as Disgrace . Coetzee has invente...

I'm plowing through Simon Schama's 3-volume A History of Britain and finding it a highly readable, entertaining and informative wo...

Like Joseph Strick's 1967 attempt to adapt Ulysses , Sean Walsh's Bloom is not a bad film. It's even a bit better than that fa...

I'm dipping deep into the well of American literature for the Euro-American Gothic of Edgar Allan Poe and finding Poe considerably more ...

Watching Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums again, I think I put my finger on the exact comic tone of the movie: it's that combina...

Anyone who reads Infinite Jest seeking clues to David Foster Wallace's self-murder will be rewarded on pages 695-7 (in the Back Bay Boo...

British writer J.G. Ballard died Sunday at age 78. The Guardian obituary and links to related articles are here . This is sad news, but as ...

Alice Sebold's novel of transcendental kitsch, The Lovely Bones , teases and manipulates the reader with horror and death but never rea...

While Marlowe's Edward II is not a great work, it is notable for its matter-of-fact handling of the king's sexuality. As with the l...

Reading yet again the "Breathing In" section of Michael Herr's Dispatches and trying once more to understand exactly why it w...

Bolano's Savage Detectives impresses me considerably less than it did the overly effusive James Wood, who praised (?) it as "amaz...

James Wood's How Fiction Works , while clearly mistitled (it should be called How James Wood Thinks Fiction Works or maybe How Claire...

At one point in W.G. Sebald's Vertigo the unnamed narrator, traveling by bus through northern Italy, sees a pair of twin boys who rese...

I'm wandering around inside The Decameron , skipping my way through Boccaccio's world and finding the stories surprisingly good. Rea...

Within the order of capitalism, the greatest transgression, the most subversive obscenity, is voluntary failure. To be a Bartleby who lives ...

"Our culture...desires men who will be willing to be mowed down in anonymous rows if need be, used up in families in farms and factorie...

Here are a few ironclad rules for reading: Trust the tale, not the teller. (Closely paraphrased from D.H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic ...

John Hawkes's The Lime Twig is a beautifully written, imagistically rich, highly elliptical novella that has certain atmospheric simila...

One of the more amusing British literary dust-ups of recent years began when A.N. Wilson was duped into including in his book on John Betjem...

Gombrowicz's Cosmos is a mercifully short novel that works very well until about the halfway point. When the characters go to the mount...

The stories of Saadat Hasan Manto, which I've been wanting to read ever since reading Salman Rushdie's description of "Toba Tek...

Vargas Llosa's first novel The Time of the Hero (as the English publishers inexplicably translate the Spanish title La Ciudad et los Pe...

(NOTE: The following was written in my notebook in early 2008. A few subsequent events, most importantly the election of Barack Obama, have ...

There are a few scenes in King Lear that move me intensely: Lear on the heath, inquiring of the hovel offered as shelter from the storm, ...