Bibliophage

Mind Games with Dennis Lehane

Fri, 23 Jul 2004 20:15:53 +0530

With Mystic River Lehane catapulted himself to the top of the thriller psychological and mind-games genre. It must have been a very hard act to follow. With Shutter Island, Lehane almost pulls off the ultimate writer’s coup of going one better. Almost, but not quite; but it is still an extraordinary thriller, well above the median in the genre.

Wilde At Heart

Thu, 15 Jul 2004 20:47:27 +0530

Holland is Oscar Wilde’s grandson and, with John Mortimer, in this astonishing book he shows us the enfant terrible (or perhaps by then the eminence grise) of London’s literary circle battling, albeit unwittingly, for his very life. The book contains the entire, unexpurgated tanscript — previous versions were heavily censored.

Gods, Mongrels & Demons

Wed, 19 May 2004 08:45:33 +0530

Angus Calder’s thesis, summarized on the dust jacket flap, is that the weird deserve centre-stage because these creatures are the zeitgeist of our world and, quite independently, are inherently interesting. He argues that they may even be more telling than better-known entities.

Bookbooks

Wed, 05 May 2004 08:48:35 +0530

Lynn Truss’s “Eats, Shoots and Leaves” turned out to be an utterly delightful discovery. It was a journey into a land I love — punctuation. The lady is endearingly nutty: she once picketed the movie Two Weeks Notice with an apostrophe on a stick, wanting to bring the apostrophe back into the title, after Weeks. But it is full of deep insights and Truss moves with unerring instinct through treacherous territory. Her comments on why we need punctuation at all; how the Internet has damaged language (“it’s not writing, or even typing; it’s just sending”) and how punctuation is actually critical not just to reading and writing but to basic communication are sharp and accurate. She takes a good, hard swipe at the modern trend of self-publishing, so easy with the Internet (bloggers, beware!) and she’s actually right. Some of the comments and customer reviews at Amazon, for instance, are truly hideous, full of typos, badly punctuated and not proofed at all.

Not So Curious

Fri, 30 Apr 2004 08:42:58 +0530

When Jay McInerney wrote a rave review in the New York Times of Mark Haddon’s “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time”, I rushed out for a hardback. This has got to be good, I thought.

Just Awful

Sun, 11 Apr 2004 08:39:06 +0530

Carrie Fisher’s The Best Awful is an elliptical work. That’s not a compliment. I mean it literally. She uses ellipses with something bordering on a pathological condition … and it does … nothing … for an already doomed book. That’s not as bad as her use of the em dash. Now that’s really something. Everywhere you go, the em dash lurks, ready to — pounce.

Thank you John Frankenheimer: Path To War

Tue, 30 Mar 2004 01:46:36 +0530

The peculiar thing about John Frankenheimer’s work is that it is consistently good. That’s not something one can say about most directors working today. I hope this isn’t a completely odious comparison, but take John Woo. He made the astonishing The Killer in Hong Kong, his last before he migrated to what is now Schwarzennegeria where he made Hard Target and then the breathtakingly conceived and brilliantly executed Face Off. Everything else has been disappointing, including especially Broken Arrow and, I’m sorry to say, Mission Impossible:II, though I must admit to having found something of quality in the very heavily flawed Windtalkers.

Web usability

Sun, 14 Mar 2004 10:05:06 +0530

A great blog entry:Blogcritics.org: Homepage Useability: 50 Websites Deconstructed - by Jacob Nielsen. The blogcritics.org site, said to be a “sinister cabal of superior bloggers on music, books, film, popular culture and technology”, is becoming a favourite haunt. One of its more prolific contributors is bookofjoe, who authored the terrific blog review of Jacob Nielsen’s “Homepage Usability”.

Two Bad

Tue, 09 Mar 2004 08:35:47 +0530

Perhaps I ought to have paid more attention to The Da Vinci Code. It was such an irresistibly delightful lark that I didn’t look very closely at the language. Certainly, nothing dreadful jumped out and whacked you in the face. This isn’t true, however, of “Deception Point” or “Digital Fortress”. Like “Da Vinci Code”, they’re silly and slight, the kind of thing you carry on a long plane journey, but at least “The Da Vinci Code” was clever, even though it’s theories are nothing but a well-known con, as an excellent article in the New York Times shows.

Kill Bill

Fri, 20 Feb 2004 21:47:24 +0530

Evidently there are degrees of violence. There is the sleep-wrecking, mind-numbing, stomach-churning, vomit-inducing violence of In Hell (Van Damme and other specimens) or Con Air. And there is the Tarantino brand of violence. Tarantino does extreme violence, but he does it with unparalleled élan and a singularity of beyond-the-box-office purpose. The result is magnificent: at one level, a beast under the hood with enormous raw power and wildly exaggerated style — a Bugatti. But there’s a whole lot more if you only care to look. The CCs (“carping critics”) who find the film ‘hollow’ and ‘shallow’ have of course totally missed the point. They also say much the same about Robert Rodriguez, and they’re wrong there too.

The Life of David Gale

Mon, 19 Jan 2004 01:48:43 +0530

Alan Parker’s “The Life of David Gale” is a really, really stupid film about a really, really vital subject. Is the Death Penalty justifiable, defensible? When? How does it square with fundamental human rights?

The Blind Man of Seville

Thu, 15 Jan 2004 08:32:15 +0530

I so thoroughly enjoyed Robert Wilson’s A Small Death in Lisbon and The Company of Strangers that I couldn’t wait to get into this one. To call it a disppointment is not just putting it mildly, it’s giving the book far more credit than it possibly deserves. This is a mean-spirited, small-hearted, oppressive book from start to finish.

The King in the Tree

Mon, 29 Dec 2003 08:29:48 +0530

Stephen Millhauser’s The King In the Tree is, without question, a tour-de-force. These are three novellas and each one is blindingly brilliant, dazzling. Millhauser writes like an angel: the language is taut, superbly controlled. There is nothing of the bludgeon in this writing — Millhauser is like a surgeon at the peak of his profession and he wields the scalpel of his writing with breathtaking virtuosity and skill as he dissects that most basic — and, in his conceptualisation, the most base — of all human emotions: love.

Embers

Sun, 21 Dec 2003 01:36:40 +0530

After a gap of 41 years, two friends meet. One, a retired General, Henrik, lives alone, a widower, in a Hungarian castle with only his faithful retainers. There’s a history in the walls of the place. And, tonight, after a 41 years, there is a guest to dinner. Everything is arranged just as it once was, so many years ago.

Coming Through Slaughter

Tue, 11 Nov 2003 01:43:16 +0530

Geoff Dyer, in his astonishing “But Beautiful” says that Michael Ondaatje’s “Coming Through Slaughter” is arguably the greatest novel about jazz ever written. Dyer’s book is itself a masterful exposition of the nature and essence of jazz, played through the saxophone of literary fiction and it’s quickly clear that Dyer’s reference to Ondaatje’s novel is itself a reflection of another jazz tradition: acknowledging the influences that shape the present artist’s work.