Month: October 2006
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Mr. Dimock Explores the Mysteries of the East by Edward Cameron DimockAlgonquin Books, 1999
This book, subtitled “Journeys in India,” is a series of clever and chatty vignettes about Indian culture and life on the Indian subcontinent. Dimock is at his best telling funny stories: the one about the monkey who gets into the house and amuses itself at Dimock’s wife’s dressing table; the one about the difficulties of…
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The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea by Mark HaddonVintage, 2006 (originally Picador, 2005)
The first poem in this collection uses, as its title, a phrase from near the end of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (“Go, litel bok”); Chaucer is quoted again in the fourth poem (which includes the line “our litel spot of erthe that with the see embracéd is”). Much of the book is similarly allusive (translations/reworkings…
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Vanity Fair by William Makepeace ThackerayB&N Classics, 2003 (originally Punch, 1847)
Wit and cleverness and social climbing and downfall: an epic that’s “a novel without a hero,” just so much hypocrisy and dissatisfaction.