Houses, like Proust, are nocturnal. But still wide awake now at dawn. A lightening, a clarity, a tang in the air. As though behind these old dwellings the sea. Nascent ardour … of May, green bananas, Young children … the early Renaissance. And therefore intense presence – everything Freshly and keenly itself. Except me. We are actors impersonating ourselves, Nietzsche claimed. But no performance today. Be no one and all may be offered to you. Be nothing and the glad world rushes in. The post Early appeared first on TLS ..read more

The premiss of Ariane Koch’s debut novel is outwardly simple: a long-time resident of a small mountain town takes in an unnamed visitor and problems ensue. But Overstaying is rather more complex than that. The narrator’s attitude to her fellow townspeople is contemptuous from the outset. Sitting in a local bar, she imagines those alongside her shrunk to doll-like proportions, such that “I alone remained large, so I no longer fit in it. Then it occurred to me that this was already the situation”. She casually mentions that her great-grandfather was a cult leader. When the visitor arrives in tow ..read more

The campaigning novel that Suzie Miller has written to develop and fill in the background to her award-winning one-woman play Prima Facie (2019) offers a first-person account of Tessa Ensler’s life as a junior barrister. Tessa has done exceptionally well. She has overcome a tough childhood to gain a place at Cambridge, followed by a scholarship in chambers and now great success in her first years in practice at the Bar. She owns a two-bedroom flat, and she graduates from a second-hand wig and gown to having her own made by Ede & Ravenscroft. These days she feels out of place in her old lif ..read more

The Devil’s Grip concerns an unnamed Swedish protagonist in a toxic relationship with a Florentine to whom she mentally refers “as il pulito” (“the clean one”). He is certainly “neat and tidy now”, the woman having encouraged him to cut his hair, replace his wardrobe and get in shape. She has misread him as a “fixer-upper”, when in fact the ugliness that has kept other women away is more moral than physical. He dubs her “Minnie” because “he’s always wanted a woman who is as quiet as a mouse, a Minnie Mouse type who isn’t intrusive”. Disliking the implications, she decides to call him “Mickey ..read more

The title of José Donoso’s monumental novel El obsceno pájaro de la noche (1970) comes from a letter Henry James Sr. wrote to his sons Henry and William, quoted in the novel’s epigraph. Life, warns the father, is “no farce”, not even a “genteel comedy”. Beneath there are always the “profoundest tragic depths”. Indeed, “the natural inheritance of anyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of the night chatters”. There could be no better description of Donoso’s fiction. Brought up in the genteel comfort of an upper-class – if provinci ..read more

Helen Oyeyemi likes unreliable narrators. Her novel Peaces (2021), for example, was told primarily in the voice of a lying mesmerist. Oyeyemi’s new novel, Parasol Against the Axe, begins in what seems, at moments, to be the voice of Prague itself, which freely claims that it is “all right for a city to pull a leg or two when the mood is upon it”. Elsewhere our storyteller is the enigmatic Wendell Wechsler, who might be the Golem, and whose name combines German words for “turn” and “change”, a metamorphic trickster who marries one character and, under a different name, threatens to cut another ..read more

One of the most important benchmarks in the career of the novelist Haruki Murakami, on his way to becoming the world-renowned figure he is today, was his receipt in 1985 of the Jun’ichirō Tanizaki prize for his novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. Named in honour of a novelist who had rejected the autobiographical mainstream of Japanese fiction in favour of wholly imagined fictional worlds, the award was well suited to Murakami, who told an interviewer at the time that there was nothing he enjoyed so much as the process of describing with ever finer precision the details of a ..read more

Change is a companion piece to Édouard Louis’s first book, En Finir avec Eddy Bellegueule (2014). That was a bestseller in France and was deftly translated by Michael Lucey as The End of Eddy (2017). Billed as a novel, it was very much a Bildungsroman, charting the coming of age of the eponymous Eddy as he tries to survive poverty, violence and homophobia in a bleak village in northern France. The book’s attraction lay partly in the power, intelligence and urgency of the writing, which lassoed the reader as a witness to the protagonist’s suffering and degradation. It also appealed to a contemp ..read more

Not every reader would second Tennyson’s desire for “a great novel in hundreds of volumes that I might go on and on”. He was thinking of eighteenth-century fiction when he said this – in particular of Samuel Richardson, whose prolixity seemed even to the author himself to amount to a strange compulsion. Clarissa, first published in seven volumes from 1748 to 1749, runs to almost one million words. Yet it was not until several decades later that reviewers began to complain as a matter of course that the sheer bulk of fiction was exceeding their patience. The drive to write more and more, and lo ..read more

“What a work could be written on Shakespeare, Hogarth and Garrick! There is something similar in the genius of all three: intuitive knowledge of men of every class made comprehensible through words, engraving tool and gesture respectively.” This celebrated observation by the German aphorist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg is often quoted, but in Robin Simon’s magisterial study it becomes the focal point of an inquiry into the relationship between theatre and the visual arts. It was a relationship of which Hogarth and Garrick were keenly aware. Hogarth often compared himself to a dramatic writer, r ..read more