David Mehegan

Book Review: Sanford Friedman’s Utterly Original “Conversations with Beethoven”

October 2, 2014
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How well Conversations with Beethoven works as fiction will depend on the engagement and imaginative powers of the reader.

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Book Review: “Trieste” — A Vivid and Lurid Chronicle of Horrors

February 19, 2014
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As fiction, “Trieste” is almost entirely a dense tapestry of thinking, remembering, agonizing and raging.

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Book Review: “The Woman Who Lost Her Soul” — A Lengthy Tale of Innocence Betrayed

October 21, 2013
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Despite his weakness for overwriting, Bob Shacochis has a good and sad story to tell, and he gets through it with a degree of mastery.

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Fuse Book Review: “The Infatuations” — Funereal Ruminations on a Murder

August 18, 2013
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Perhaps it is not so much that the characters are thinly developed but that it is hard to make them out through the scrim of their Dostoevskian lucubrations.

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Book Review: “In Times of Fading Light” — A Rich Story of Divided Hearts

June 8, 2013
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Though its central events are in the past, conveyed by characters by means of often ambiguous shreds of memory and musing, “In Times of Fading Light” is a work of quiet power and beauty, dense with sorrow, telling detail, and suspense.

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Book Review: Denise Levertov — More Than a Famous Antiwar Poet

May 22, 2013
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This meticulous biography of Anglo-American poet Denise Levertov is the labor of many years and of deep reflection and care.

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Book Review: “How Literature Saved My Life” — Maybe

February 1, 2013
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Notwithstanding all that David Shields writes about the books and authors he loves, both classic and contemporary, he announces that today he can’t bear to write or read novels or even short stories in their old familiar forms and structures.

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Fuse Book Review: “The Testament of Mary” — Thin Fictional Iconoclasm

November 27, 2012
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Acclaimed Irish writer Colm Tόibín has penned a strangely compelling tale, full of terror, heartbreak, and finally a tone of resignation and even depression.

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Book Review: Per Petterson’s “It’s Fine By Me” — A Sensitive Tale of a Lost Boy

October 1, 2012
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“It’s Fine By Me” is the story of so many lost boys in literature, who run, who rebel, who are crushed, or luckily find their way.

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Book Review: “Emmaus” — A Fictional Puzzle Wrapped in a Spiritual Enigma

May 13, 2012
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Alessandro Baricco’s novella Silk, filled with inchoate erotic longings for which there is no explanation, became an international bestseller. Emmaus, his latest book in translation, also contains mysteries.

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