Ntuple Indemnity

This week’s selection: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004) by Susanna Clarke.

In brief: In the height of the Napoleonic Wars, two magicians appear in England and strive to restore its long-lost tradition of wonders, but disagree on whether fairies have any role to play. On one thing we can all agree: this epic love letter to England herself is fantastic, and shouldn’t be missed.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, keep reading below.)

Continued »

This week’s selection: Coltrane: The Story of a Sound (2007) by Ben Ratliff.

In brief: Ratliff’s carefully organized history of John Coltrane’s diverse musical stylings and its legacy in post-1960s jazz is a concise work of criticism that wisely puts the musical evidence front and centre. Its great success is its insistence on establishing Coltrane’s monumental importance instead of merely asserting it as the truth.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on Coltrane, keep reading below.)

Continued »

This week’s selection: On Beauty (2005) by Zadie Smith.

In brief: Smith’s comedy of intellectual warfare in a New England college town dazzles with its ventriloquial feats of dialogue. Yet the novel is more insightful as a study of personal aesthetics, and how artistic principles motivate individual actions, than of American politics, which here seem oddly transplanted from a British sensibility.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on On Beauty, keep reading below.)

Continued »

This week’s selection: Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society (1976) by Northrop Frye.

In brief: This collection of a dozen variegated essays—some broadly accessible, others strictly for the interest of literary scholars—is a grab bag of erudite criticism that serves as thorough sampling of Frye’s one-man theory show. The academic pieces, which attempt to deduce overarching mythic cosmologies from the poetic output of writers such as Milton and Blake, are an ample demonstration of Frye’s method. Far more compelling, however, are the pieces that argue for the continued relevance of the imagination following its dislodgment from the objective world of science and history.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on Spiritus Mundi, keep reading below.)

Continued »

This week’s selection: Cat’s Cradle (1963) by Kurt Vonnegut.

In brief: Vonnegut’s apocalyptic Cold War satire is an easily digestible exercise in absurdist humour, though the whole is scarcely greater than the sum of its parts. The novel, while consistently amusing, stops short of delivering on its thematic promise to examine science and religion at the end of the world in moral, humanistic terms.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on Cat’s Cradle, keep reading below.)

Continued »