A Useful Fiction

The idea for this book is an intriguing one: that craftsmanship – the desire to do a job well for its own sake – is a thing, and it needs considering.

This satirical novel by a Brazilian writer is one of the most well regarded works of the Brazilian canon; however, it’s no Tristram Shandy: it’s not as funny, and it’s nowhere near as full of philosophical fireworks.

Some novelists, such as John Updike, consider the novel to be Greene’s masterpiece.

Many of the dangers of literature – about which we have long since forgotten – are on show in this little story of seemingly little consequence – a story by Dostoevsky – one of literature’s real bad boys (by all accounts just a frightful human being).

With a ‘modest rating of 3.8 out of 5 stars’ on Goodreads, readers either ‘love its wild imagination or find its dense lists of historical myths overwhelming’.

The author of ‘The Moustache’ is someone who, despite himself, turns out novel after novel that are original, odd, and so novel, but not ‘novels’.

Even as a pastiche of the great 1600s novel ‘Don Quixote’ by Cervantes, Greene’s novel nonetheless matches the feel of that huge book, its scale and tone, charming the reader as though over a thousand pages, as opposed to the few hundred that he wrote.

Speculative fiction is a catch-all term that includes fantasy, science fiction, science fantasy, supernatural horror, alternate history, magical realism, utopia / dystopia, apocalyptic / post-apocalyptic fiction… and every blend of these and other fiction…

Could the ultimate measure of a novel, be ‘veracity’?

“John Le Carré new book — his seventh in thirteen years — is a thoroughly enjoyable English spy novel about the discovery of a double agent at the highest level of the British Intelligence bureaucracy.

When an author’s meaning is hard to decipher there may be one of two things going on – it’s poorly written, or it’s very cleverly written.

What a delight it can be, to lose yourself in a first person narrative – if, and only if, that first person is ‘interesting’, in some way ‘worthy’, as though it’s down to some factor such as ‘charm’ or some other intangible quality.

Here we have a ‘rich story of the immigrant experience’, one which is a ‘vivid, immersive multigenerational saga about life for Koreans in Japan’, as well as a ‘tale of resilience and poignant emotional conflict’, one which Barack Obama no less accounts ‘a

Do we need more historical fiction?

Realism One of the great novelists of European critical-realist fiction – Émile Zola – really takes it up a gear when he sits down to write about stuff that never happened, first putting pen to paper in 1871.

Reading fiction at all can seem, to some people, an odd thing to do.