Nijinsky’s diary, the result of a six-week outburst of writing, at first glance grants us once in a lifetime opportunity to witness a descent into madness of a genuinely brilliant mind.
I admitted two weeks ago that I am a movie buff light. So it’s pretty obvious how my light movie buffness became awestruck, completely ineffable as a matter of fact, when I turned over the last page of Notes on Cinematography.
Some novels are extremely approachable yet highly uncooperative. They welcome you with open arms only to dodge, duck, and finally flee from your reading embrace afterwards, snapping their vicious jaws of avoidance, simpering slyly. J. G. Ballard’s Crash is one of them.
The Dreamers takes place in Paris in a turbulent spring of 1968. Ahhh, the late 60’s – the last epoch of human naivety, its last caprice of innocence.
Vian’s best known work is the finest example of what does it mean for a novel to confirm that something exists without neither material nor spiritual proof
Days made of verbs and nouns. You have turned into Verbman, a Noun monster. No qualities – just doing, listing, discerning without acknowledging.
The linguistic viscosity of Neverwhere resembles that of a fine bread spread. It covers the porous, pumice-like surface of a slice smoothly, soothing its unevenness with a mouthwatering stickiness of its thawing-fudge consistency.
The God of Literature has been alarmingly generous towards me in the last two years. Among many of his/her/its blessings was Iain Reid’s debut novel - "I’m Thinking of Ending Things".
This one may begin like this: I went to the nearby library the other day to finally put my hands on one of the classics spelled with a capital C – Don Quixote.
The writing of a novel is a form of the loss of creative liberty…. In turn, the reviewing of books is a servitude still less noble. Of the writer one can at least say that he has enslaved himself – by the theme selected.
Kensington Gardens is this particular type of book which not only falls under the “exclamation marks” category without much effort, but also courts us with its multilayeredness in a flawlessly natural fashion.
There is this anecdote about one of the ancient skeptics (Pyrrho, Sextus Empiricus? How can one remember not to forget all those names in the long run?) who reportedly went for a walk with one of his pupils.