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What is a Human Woman? – Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine
As Elizabethan literary theorist Sir Philip Sidney claims in his 16th century work titled The Defence of Poesie, the purpose of poetry, later extended to encompass all literary genres, is to simultaneously teach and delight the reader. Gail Honeyman’s debut novel Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine fits neatly into this category, since it teaches us…
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The Forgetful Narrator: Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey
The idea of a completely reliable narrator is quite a questionable subject, since we are all unreliable when it comes to telling our own stories, hence, as the term ‘omniscient’ suggests, the reliable narrator must be some kind of divine, all-knowing being, allowed a profound insight into the depths of all other characters. However, the…
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The Addled Narrator: A.J. Finn’s The Woman in the Window
After I’d completed A.J. Finn’s The Woman in the Window, I put the book down in my lap, leaned back, and stared somewhere into the middle distance while my mind went through the events in the novel once again, weighing and arranging them so as to form a neatly assembled puzzle. Eponymous of a 1944…
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Eine kleine Nachtmusik: Ishiguro’s Nocturnes
It is oft said that even the best of novelists hone their skills on short stories since they contain more or less the same elements as novels yet on a smaller scale. Kazuo Ishiguro’s charming collection titled Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall most definitely echoes some of his longer work, most notably The…
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Ready Player One – A Dystopian Cliché?
Ernest Cline’s highly popular novel, Ready Player One, has been widely acclaimed for its originality and deep immersion into the 1980s, the decade when the video-gaming as we know it today set root in the form of hugely popular video and arcade games. The readers who remember or admire this decade can get an instant…
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The Muse: Burton and Barthes
Jessie Burton again turns to the past to harness inspiration for her second book, The Muse. This time the plot moves back and forth between the 1930s civil-war-ravaged Spain and the 1960s London, yet the issue at hand is not merely another historical novel, but a much more universal topic that hits quite close to…
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Good Omens: Books, Bikers, and a Bentley
This is one of the very few books that has managed to leave me in tears (of joy and uncontrolled laughter) after every few pages. Good Omens, written by the unsurpassable Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, is irreverently hilarious revolving around an attempted Armageddon messed up by the common endeavor by a scatterbrained Satanist nun,…
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The Miniaturist: Book Review
Jessie Burton’s debut, The Miniaturist, derives inspiration from a 17th-century hobby for young wives, an ostentatious curiosity cabinet on display at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, that was built in the late 17th century, commissioned by Petronella Oortman, who wanted a replica of the luxurious townhouse in which she lived in the centre of Amsterdam. Burton’s…
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Caraval: All About the Game
I enjoy carnivals, circuses, harlequins, masks, mystery, and the complete overturning and subversion of social norms, rules, and conventions that goes with them. One of my favourite books is Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus where all of these reach a certain peak (The Stitched-up Girl), and I had something similar in mind when I…
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Adichie’s Defense of Feminism
The word feminist has been ladened with a load of negative baggage: you hate men, you burn bras, you hate your own tradition, you think women are better than men, you don’t wear make-up, you don’t shave, you’re always angry, you don’t have a sense of humour, you don’t use deodorant, etc. In her 2012…
Myths & Stories 