Category: Books

By Thomas Bernhard (1986)

So, finally forced myself to finish Extinction at the weekend. I did not get on with this at all – the whole book felt like an exercise in trying the reader’s patience. It turns out that two continuous paragraphs of hundreds of pages each, consisting entirely of the same criticisms of bourgeois Austria repeated again and again, in really very basic and graceless style – can become tiresome pretty quickly.

I don’t think I’ve read anything as simultaneously affected and leaden.

By Jeffrey Eugenides (2002)

Middlesex is another case of high expectations – I didn’t read The Virgin Suicides until recently, but it was definitely close to the top of my fiction list last year. That book is incredibly economical, unforgettably eerie and has a genuinely innovative use of a collective unreliable narrator in the neighborhood boys.

Unfortunately I’m not sure Middlesex quite lives up to this. A sprawling – and comparatively conventional – family chronicle, the story follows three generations of a Greek family fleeing war-torn Anatolia in the 20s and settling in Detroit. The novelty here is the connecting thread is the passing down of a recessive gene – having its fateful expression in inbreeding and intersexuality.

Humanistic and amiable throughout … but doesn’t quite gel

By Mikhail Bulgakov (1925)

The Heart of a Dog is terrific fun. I was a bit hesitant because The Master and Margarita is so good, but it didn’t let me down (and continues the obsession with cats, dogs and devilry).

An updating of Frankenstein to Moscow life in the chaos of the 1920s USSR, it follows the misadventures of a dog rescued off the streets and patched up with various bits of fallen (human) comrades.

It’s a brutal satire of the attempts to create a “new socialist man”, but the effect is pretty timelessly funny, with the dog-creature ending up barking soviet propaganda and haphazardly swearing at everyone. Bulgakov saw it confiscated and banned in his lifetime; it’s a considerable mystery that that was the worst that happened to him.

The Many Lives of Amory Clay by William Boyd (2015)

Sweet Caress: The Many Lives of Amory Clay is rather standard Boyd – which is to say it contains patches of really excellent writing, particularly in the first and last “lives”, and spirals around a few themes which have maybe become a bit too familiar.

The whole construction of the book feels a bit deja vu