The book provides you with the wincing secondhand anxiety of watching someone smart you know hurt themselves, repeatedly.
The Spectral Link – Thomas Ligotti
He is a metaphysical mutant in that he is a hodgepodge of clichéd horror motifs and effects, and metaphysical ideas. He’s a rhetorical monster.
Diary of the Fall – Michel Laub
According to these numbers, the narrator knows more about his grandfather (38+22=60) than either about his father (31+28=59) or about himself (31+26=57).
I don’t trust adults to write about youth as much as I did before I became an adult myself.
My Salinger Year – Joanna Rakoff
Oh, the ironies! given Holden’s low opinion of David Copperfield. To recall, he called coming of age novels written in the Copperfield mold crap.
A Distant Father – Antonio Skármeta
Brevity is not a shortcoming here and in no way keeps the narrative from being a fulfilling read.
Reads almost like slapstick Sebald, Bernhard on laughing gas.
Kit recalls the narrator of Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, her florid prose style straddling the brilliant and the bathetic, her solicitousness for her charges as paternalistic as it is admiring.
The Maggot People – Henning Koch
Serious, grotesque absurdity: The Master and Margarita as written by William Burroughs, a politico-religious sci-fi thriller with talking dogs and immortal maggot people.
David Sedaris once quipped that speaking German is like speaking English but sideways. Reading The Wallcreeper — which happens, incidentally, to be set in mostly German-speaking places — feels like reading but sideways.