A real writer, with the true comic spirit.

Hopper argues (mostly) persuasively that The Third Policeman is a postmodern metafiction far surpassing At Swim-Two-Birds in cleverness and complexity. Surprisingly easy to read, though by the end of the book I felt as if its points had been repeatedly hammered into my skull. Incidentally, Le Clerque has drawn attention to the importance of percussion in the de Selby dialectic and shown that most of the physicist’s experiments were extremely noisy. Unfortunately the hammering was always done behind closed doors and no commentator has hazarded a guess as to what was being hammered and for what purpose.

I was surprised to find that I didn’t care for this.

Russell’s writing is lucid and economical, if a bit quaint. The tone is sober but at the same time conversational (and occasionally quite witty), and Russell devotes as much space (if not more) to history as philosophy, true to the book’s name. Unexpectedly fun reading for what could have been a dry and academic topic.

Nabokov’s poignant first novel in English, written on a bidet.

Wonderful

Eagleton’s famous book is a lucid and polemical survey of most of the main currents in 20th century literary theory, including formalism, new criticism, phenomenology, reception theory, structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, and psychoanalysis. (Marxist theory and feminism aren’t covered in the main text, for reasons discussed in the afterword.) This is a great, engaging book, though it’s sometimes weighed down by Eagleton’s heavyhanded marxism, particularly towards the end.

Written in the 1920s and published in 1936 by a Spanish emigré to the U.S., “Locos” is a remarkable novel comprised of several interrelated short stories made up of characters that run riot through the novel, assuming different roles as needed, popping up in and out of the timeline, sometimes writing their own stories. It’s notable that this metafictional device predates later trends of postmodern fiction, with the only similar contemporaries being Pirandello and Flann O’Brien, but it’s Alfau’s skilled characterization and poignant narrative ability that makes the novel worth reading. I loved this book.

I keep this book by my bedside and pull it out every now and then before falling asleep, opening it to a random page and reading until I can no longer hold the train of thought. I doubt that I’ll ever read the book end to end… perhaps in forty years, though, after I retire.

I don’t really have the time to read this thing right now, maybe next summer… but I purchased it anyway, because I’m afraid that Penguin is going to reprint it with their new, ugly design.