Drew > Recent Status Updates

Just when I was enjoying you, all pink and yellow, I had to leave you at home because you’re just too big and heavy.

It’s got an absolutely gorgeous cover. It’s also very short these are both marvellous attributes. The first 50 pages are a hoot.

I love the way that le Clézio introduces apparently essential facts in passing as the novel progresses, changing our perspective on everything that we've read up to that point. Each time he does it, the novel's past bucks, flexes and resettles as we reinterpret what we know in the light of the new information. Welcome to the rodeo.

I'm having a really hard time getting through this one. I really don't know why it's such hard work: the constantly shifting viewpoints maybe? The acrobatically expressionist thought-world? The tricky American-English translation which is often chewy and dense?
Childhood, Youth, Dependency really is one of my favourite books bar none, so I'm a bit mystified why this one is such a slog.

A beautiful captivating book so far.

I’m about halfway through here, and still quite perplexed about what is going on, who everyone is, and why I should care. Clearly, there is a big gap between her earlier trilogy and this book, but I’m not sure whether this is a question of her style changing completely, a translation problem or a combination of the two.

This book started out quite powerfully and was a lot of fun, but it feels like the batteries are fading on the Home lap.

A free jazz memoir that rolls its own stories and floats above the parapet of genre like a bright flag. It's an exhilarating torrent of ideas, opinions and silliness. Whoever decided to call it a novel is probably still enjoying the joke.

The carriage scene was breathtaking.

I was about to start reading Malina by Ingeborg Bachmann and realised that it too has a major character called Ivan. That really would have been too many Ivans at the same time.

In many ways it's an oddity that this book's rich embroidery of dreams, desires and romantic folly has come to signify the apogee of realism.
What realism there is lies in the way that Flaubert brutally undercuts these fanciful daydreams with the bathos of provincial life in Normandy

These stories veer between the incomprehensible and the terrifying, each page an uncanny and disturbing step along a dark and uncertain path with the mountain above and the icy cliff-edge below...

So much fun.