GatesyRead

The premise of this novel appeals to fans of metafiction and Salman Rushdie. A spy thriller writer, Sam DuChamp, turns his attention to a more literary story—a picaresque novel about Ismail Smile — a traveling salesman of pharmaceutical products. Smile falls in love with a TV-host star, and travels across America on quest to win her love. Meanwhile, Smile conjures up a son, Sancho, who begins to have a life of his own, slowly moving from the imaginary world to the world of flesh and blood.  Like a 19th century novel, each chapter begins with a helpful summary as subtitle (e.g. Chapter One: Quichotte, an old man, falls in love, embarks on a quest & becomes a father). Chapter Two introduces the author of the character Quichotte – Sam DuChamp, and so the layering of the fictional world begins. So far, so good. When introducing DuChamp, however, the narrator highlights DuChamp’s fictional status (“we will call him Brother” p.21). Then there is the unsettling instability of the text...

Jonathon Coe and this reader share many passions, though Coe drips success, and I mostly just drip. Here’s Coe: MA, PhD in literature; musician before a writer; fan of progressive rock; the Duke of Prunes in Javier Marías’s kingdom of Redonda . Mr Wilder and Me is his latest work, and the first Coe novel I have read. Good gifts are like that: just outside your reading preferences but connected to your interests in one way or another. Here we have a young adventurer (Calista) and a real-life film legend, Billy Wilder. There is a Greek island and sharp conversations and gleaned insights into the mind of an aging artist and his urgent need to create, even when the times have changed and success of films like Sunset Boulevard and Double Indemnity is in the past. Coe bookends the novel in the near-present with Calista in London, ‘almost sixty’, about to drive one of her daughters to Heathrow (she’s headed to Australia, a crisis point in many an English household and story). Calista has ...

The Midnight Library is Borges-Lite. Think ‘The Library of Babel’ as a novel for twenty-somethings. A confused young woman – attempting suicide – ends up in a library as a half-way house between here and there. On the shelves are an infinite number of variations of the life she has to this point led, and she has a chance to try them all. Until the shoe fits. (The shoe, however, gets tighter and death – real death – is a distinct possibility). Nora Seed has gone to seed – she has walked away from a musical dream and let her brother down in the process; she lives alone after dumping her fiancé; she's a depressive employee of a music shop where moping puts off customers. There’s not much worth living for, she thinks. Once in the library (having taken the red pill or the blue pill, or both) she comes across the manifestation of the kind librarian who looked after her the day her mother died, while still at school. Kindness is returned in the temporary after life.  What would you ch...

  The Labyrinth of the Spirits is the final instalment of a cycle known as "The Cemetery of Forgotten Books". Its predecessors include The Shadow of the Wind (2004), The Angel’s Game (2009) and The Prisoner of Heaven (2013). This equates to 2232 pages, and that means I have spent quite a few hours over the years in the esteemed company of the author Carlos Ruiz Zaf ó n, who sadly left us much too early this year, aged 55. The popularity of the series must buoy fans of literature in that the subject of the novels is literature itself, though the context is the dark period of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath in Franco’s Spain. The melding of Letters and History produces a unique blend of genres, including mystery, crime, romance, thriller (and various subgenres, such as literary thriller and political thriller). In this, there is something for everyone – though this last instalment is over 800 pages – so one for those who like their books big, like a big Shiraz. ...

I am forever playing catch-up with prolific writers like Ian McEwan, who has published 17 novels (and I have managed  to read just 6: Black Dogs, Enduring Love, Amsterdam, Atonement, Solar, Machines like Me ). Solar , I found on the street library, and I am reluctant to put it back. The book deals, in a comic sort of way, with the climate crisis through the story of a Nobel prize-winner, a physicist, who appears to be more interested in his peccadilloes than his protons. McEwan opens his book with a line that only an established male writer could get away with: ‘He belonged to that class of men – vaguely unprepossessing, often bald, fat, clever – who are unaccountably attractive to certain beautiful women’ (3). “Unaccountable” is the key to the sentence: Michael Beard has a string of ex-wives, one on the way out and a lover to compensate; but he has money and a degree of fame, and that (perhaps) accounts for the unaccountable. In the manner of English novels written by men abou...

In a 2013 opinion piece ‘ Misogyny lurks in Winton's world of fiction’ , Nicolle Flint weighed up Tim Winton’s various representations of male and female character in his novels and concluded: …These female characters appear stereotypical. They ''bother''. What remains most remarkable about Tim Winton's writing, in the context of ongoing allegations of sexism and misogyny, is that the literary left leaves the handiwork of one of our most revered cultural icons unexamined. ''Sometimes,'' as Bob Dylan once sang, ''the silence can be like thunder.'' Bob Dylan also sang ‘The Times, they are a-changing”, and Winton has spoken directly about such accusations. ( Guardian interview with Gay Alcorn, 2018): “ I’m writing outside the enclave of the inner city, and what’s happening in the world that I’m seeing is that women are having a harder trajectory than men. And if there has to be a body count, does nobody seem to notice that most of t...

I picked up Ian McEwan’s Back Dogs at a second hand book fair on the Central Coast – a first edition with an intriguing inscription from Peter to Spanner ‘computer correspondent, writer and journalist’ and worthy friend to Peter. Spanner sounds like a busy man, but surely not as prolific a writer McEwan. I have read (in reverse order) Machines like Me , Atonement, Amsterdam, Enduring Love and now Black Dogs, and that’s only one fifth of his published novels. This one at least is short – 174 pages with generous margins. Black Dogs starts with a preface in which the narrator confesses to a fascination with other people’s parents, having lost his own to an accident at the age of eight. Soon enough his wife’s parents, June and Bernard, have taken centre stage and it is they who are the subject of the story to unfold. Our narrator, Jeremy, is thus both biographer and storyteller with a writer’s neat tricks, like this one: ‘I have taken a number of liberties, the most flagrant o...