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davidjames's reviews
11 reviews
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
fifty per cent of this is maybe the most ecstatically brilliant writing i've ever read. it took me way longer than really necessary to finish it because every page had a sentence or two that would make me put the book down and go PHWOAR like gregg wallace experiencing some laaaahvly flayvah on masterchef. the other fifty per cent is possibly also just as good but just needs another read through or two to click into place, and possibly just her getting a bit carried away. the drawback i found with woolf's writing is when it doesn't work it's pretty obnoxious to read; she does these massive fuckoff sentences; all stuffed with bizarrely placed semicolons; they go on for pages; and pages; and pages; like that one about the woman outside the tube station who seemed like some kind of primordial god or something; ma'am; what; the hell; are you on about;.
but then as i say she has a pretty amazing hit rate, it really is something like half of all those massive sentences which make just about complete sense and are totally vivid and make you feel so glad to be alive in a way i've never got from any other piece of writing. so who's to say if it's good or not. me. i would say overall it's very good
but then as i say she has a pretty amazing hit rate, it really is something like half of all those massive sentences which make just about complete sense and are totally vivid and make you feel so glad to be alive in a way i've never got from any other piece of writing. so who's to say if it's good or not. me. i would say overall it's very good
The Ballad of Peckham Rye by Muriel Spark
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
not so sure about this one. seems like it's a very Muriel Spark thing to have heaps of characters packed into a relatively short novel, but TPOMJB gets away with it so much better than this - the sections without Dougal Douglas in them drag on because every character who isn't him is just vastly less interesting than he is, and he always gets all the best bits of writing ("Dougal put Mr Druce through the process of his smile, which was wide and full of white young teeth" is so great). fun enough read although nowhere near as good as Prime, definitely gonna read more Spark in the future
America Over the Water by Shirley Collins
enjoyed this a lot! Collins' prose is as modest and unaffected as her singing, to much the same effect: even in her own autobiography, she rarely takes centre stage, focusing far more on the other people in her life and on the singers she meets. Admirable as this approach is, it's only as effective as it is because the story she's telling (briefly: how a young, working-class girl ended up travelling across the southern US recording folksongs) is completely fascinating. The parts about her upbringing in Hastings are charming but probably mostly interesting to people who are already fans of Collins herself (like me!); the trip across America is essential reading for anyone interested in traditional music and America immediately before the Civil Rights era.
A Death in the Family by Karl Ove Knausgård
slow-paced
infectiously miserable, in every sense of the word. god only knows if it's actually good or not; it's definitely not good for me. still vaguely tempted to read the other 5 (mainly to experience more High! Octane! Wife! Hating! Action! and see what's in those 400 pages about Hitler), so note to self: reading this was a grim experience, do not touch this stuff again.
Shyness and Dignity by Dag Solstad
4.5
by rights this thing should be an absolute catastrophe. the only properly fleshed out character is the guy who attacks schoolchildren with an umbrella; the other two main characters, such as they are, seem less like real believable people and more like caricatures drawn by an alien trying to pass as a human. and GOD, the writing is exhausting - all long unwieldy rambling sentences which clump together to form paragraphs that regularly last 10 pages at a time. for some reason I haven't been able to work out, it's actually completely hypnotic all the way through, and a weirdly touching discussion of how years of disappointment and tedium can grind away at an ordinary, well-meaning guy.
people who read Hunger and wished the narrator would just get a hot dog and try to act like a human being (and/or that the author wasn't an elitist shithead with ever-increasingly wacky things to say about Hitler), this one's for you.
people who read Hunger and wished the narrator would just get a hot dog and try to act like a human being (and/or that the author wasn't an elitist shithead with ever-increasingly wacky things to say about Hitler), this one's for you.
Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun
slow-paced
three hundred pages of glacially paced volkisch tat. for much better results, watch jonathan meades' 'jerry building' and listen to soundbites like "anti-urbanism is at best crankish, and at worst a gateway to horror."
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
Did not finish book.
Did not finish book.
fascinating book but this thing is insanely, unbelievably long. rule #1 of reading is it's longer than it looks. will finish it one day tho
The Father by August Strindberg
an absolute whopper of a play. this man completely was out of his gourd. do not trust women, folks