John Taylor

Book Review: Enduring the Unendurable — Philippe Rahmy’s Extraordinary Portrait of Pain

November 30, 2014
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Philippe Rahmy is afflicted with brittle-bone disease: in his superb writing, he takes off from his incurable inherited condition and ventures out courageously.

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Book Review: Into the Labyrinth of Fragmentary Memories — The Novels of Patrick Modiano

November 19, 2014
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The prose of Patrick Modiano, this year’s Nobel prizewinner, has a distinctive French style whose directness and grammatical limpidity by no means exclude semantic depth and complexity.

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Book Review: The Story of the ‘Hand Grenade’ — Emmanuel Carrère’s Biography of the Russian Writer Eduard Limonov

November 5, 2014
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A compelling chronicle of the life of the notorious Russian writer and political activist Eduard Limonov.

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Fuse Book Review: The Novels of Mathias Énard — Probing the Intersection of Politics and Conscience

October 24, 2014
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Although Street of Thieves is less accomplished than Zone, it once again displays how Mathias Énard is seeking new ways to talk political issues in precise, often gripping prose.

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Book Review: In Quest of the Elemental — André du Bouchet’s “Openwork”

October 13, 2014
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André du Bouchet writes the kind of poetry that other poets ponder, perhaps resist or even reject for a while, yet inevitably return to study even if (or because) their own poetics are starkly dissimilar to his.

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Book Review: “The fuzzy cinema of certain key events of my life” – Frankétienne’s “spiralist” novel “Ready to Burst”

October 6, 2014
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Ready to Burst is a compelling, intricately structured story told in resourceful, oft-poetic language by a influential Haitian poet and novelist.

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Book Review: The Darkly Droll, Desperately Farcical “Privy Portrait”

September 5, 2014
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Privy Portrait portrays a contemporary human being who has lost all handholds, all footholds, all practical, moral, and metaphysical support—except for that provided by the articles of his beloved encyclopedia.

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Book Review: “Our Lady of the Nile” — Prefiguring Rwandan Genocide

August 26, 2014
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Because of the national tension between the Tutsis and the Hutus, and its effects on everyday routines in the school, this novel cannot long remain a bemusing tale of adolescent life.

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Poetry Review: Romanian Poet Gellu Naum — Living in the “Blue Crypt under the Night’s Obscure Seal”

August 22, 2014
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Gellu Naum does not use the heterogeneous juxtapositions of surrealism to create something jocular, absurd, prankish, or gratuitously paradoxical.

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Book Review: Grim Light Reading — Alain Robbe-Grillet’s “A Sentimental Novel”

June 9, 2014
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A Sentimental Novel, which seems to be at once pornography and a parody of pornography, is designed to provoke both revulsion and titillation.

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