Jonathan Franzen Freedom Harper, 2010 If you happened to have read my response to The Corrections last month, you might well have expected my response to Freedom to appear here sometime in 2020. But although it took me nearly ten years to get around to reading the first, it took only
Gustav Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857) Trans. Alan Russell Penguin, 1987 Emma Bovary and I have met before, but we were not long acquainted. I started to read Flaubert's novel in between high school and university, but I never finished it. Not even close, actually. When we last moved house, I
Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections Harper, 2001 They splotch the busy reader's bookshelf: those oversized contemporary novels that you haven't read yet. You expect Dickens and Trollope and Tolstoy to span the reading weeks, but you expect contemporary novels to be more portable, more succinct, more zip-through-able. It makes it harder
Arnold Bennett, Riceyman Steps Grosset & Dunlap (1923) My experience with Arnold Bennett's fiction can be easily summed up: The Old Wives' Tale (1908). But what I lack in experience, I make up for in enthusiasm: I loved that novel. I was expecting it to be old-fashioned, dreary and a
Joan Barfoot's Dancing in the Dark Macmillan, 1982 (not the image shown) When I re-read Abra earlier this month, I mentioned that it felt both quiet and revolutionary at the same time. The narrator's self-discovery is relayed through the filter of memory, and the bulk of the action is internal,
