I’m going back in these reviews – beginning with the first one – and selecting some to post again. I’ll only choose books that are well-known, or by famous authors. I’ll alternate favorable reviews with critical ones. In most cases, I’ve reviewed other books by an author. You can access those (reviews) by going to their first name on the bottom left of this blog.

I’ll also keep reviewing books I currently read, though I’m slowing down as a reader.

I’ll designate the recycled reviews as “Reviews from the past”

Reviews from the past

Ship of Fools - Katherine Anne Porter

A long novel, in very short sections separated by a skipped space. Porter includes a ship’s roster to help the reader keep the many characters straight. The individuals are varied, and I found them all to be complex, interesting and real. I've read criticism saying that most of the people are the same at the end of the voyage as they were at the beginning. This didn’t bother me one bit, for Porter’s view of humanity includes just such a static picture: miserable souls will never be freed from their particular forms of misery. Porter is very good with evil; Rick and Rack are frightening in their innate amorality. She also examines prejudice (the novel takes place just before WWII). Another thing critics objected to was her unflattering portrayal of the one Jew on the ship; yet should he be pure when so many others aren’t? Her prose is worthy of study; it combines the best of the elaborate and the simple. Also, the dog, Bebe, is wonderful. * (2)

On my Tapping on the Wall blog I've written two essays that deal, in part, with KAP: One and Done and The Ladder of Success

Let It Come Down - Paul Bowles

I had quite enough of Bowles when I finished this novel. He can do so many things well – create interesting characters, scenes, dialogue, mood. The exotic setting (Morocco) was especially good. Yet he can’t make sense of it all. He stays, at length, in his main character’s thoughts, but that mind is muddled from hashish. Bowles moves the plot along in fits and starts; he has people act in unlikely ways, abandons characters and lines of action which he’s spent much time developing. Bowles may be lazy or hashish-addled himself; at any rate, he seems incapable of sustaining logic. What he can do – and does often (I’ve read three of his novels and some stories) – is come up with some really repugnant cruelty at the end. (4)

Chronicle of a Death Foretold - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Spanish)

Garcia Marquez circles around a murder obsessively, around and around, from different angles and perspectives, and at the end we’re there for the knife thrusts. It’s as if a vast cosmic command – unavoidable and terrible – is being obeyed by us poor mortals. The author includes discrepancies in the various accounts of the killing. Most significantly, he leaves a key question unanswered: Did Angela accuse Santiago falsely? Garcia Marquez presents us with an unsolvable mystery, one that takes on dimensions larger than a single murder in an isolated town. * (4)

Pere Goriot - Honore Balzac (French)

A bad so-called “great” novel. There are scenes and characters that come alive, and the cynicism seemed bracing – for a while. But it soon became clear that the book was overblown and improbable. Some parts are downright ridiculous. Just before he expires on his deathbed, Old Goriot has the strength to make a six (6!) page speech. Sections read like melodrama from a book for adolescents, such as the whole episode about the master thief Vautrin. Rastignac’s weeping got to be too much for me. I’m not in sympathy with the sensibilities of that period in French cultural life when being in Parisian society was all-important. Balzac seems to be cynically criticizing it, through the eyes of Rastignac, but at the end Rastignac chooses to enter that false and despicable and unhappy world. Why? Did he really need calfskin gloves? Lastly, the book was sloppily written, and I don’t think the translator is to blame.