What I'm Reading/In the Book Review
After a few short and piquant fictions (The Uncommon Reader, What’s for Dinner?), I resolved to sink my teeth into something that would keep me for a while, Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book, as newly translated by Maureen Freely. One does not rush through Mr Pamuk’s rich, semi-Dostoevskyan novels, even when their autobiographical aspects are familiar from other books (Istanbul, for example). I’m also working my way through Tim Blanning’s The Pursuit of Glory, which so far is solidly pedestrian (although very well-written). Finally (for the moment), there’s Alice Munro’s collection of old family stories, with the missing bits filled in by the author’s imagination. Meta-nonfiction? Fiction, schmiction. The View from Castle Rock reads like the vintage Munro that it is.
As for this week’s Book Review, there are lots of Yeses, and more Noes than Maybes. Among the Noes is Alice Sebold’s second novel, which, appropriately enough given its plot, is currently being dismembered by a school of barracuda critics who deplored the success of The Lovely Bones. Ms Sebold will be lucky to have her work appear in the fifteenth Library of America collection of crime fiction, when it appears in fifty years.
¶ True Believers.