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Jonathan Safran Foer's 2005 novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close   is one that I found compelling - I read it in a couple of days - but somehow, not particularly enjoyable. The premise is intriguing: the book tells the story of a nine year old boy, Oskar Schell, whose father was killed in the 9/11 attack. Oskar finds a key in a vase belonging to his father, and feels compelled to discover the key's origins and purpose. From a note left inside the vase Oskar concludes that the owner of the key is named Black, and sets out to visit everybody in New York with that surname. The book is thus a kind of journey story, and is filled with a range of eccentric characters, but there was some thing about it which I did not find engaging. The novel is told in the first person, but Foer contrives, by introducing two separate series of letters,  to shift the narrator from Oskar to his grandfather (writing to Oskar's father) and his grandmother (writing to Oskar himself). The let...

Last time I posted, I said Middlemarch is the greatest English novel of the Victorian era. Katherine replied, and said on the strength of that recommendation she'd gone and bought it. Wow! Power! Who'd have thought it? It's an anxiety making thing, being taken notice of like that. Well, it's a great book, and if she's the sort of person who can settle into the century old language, and can handle big ideas cropping up on every second page, she'll absolutely love it.  It's big, rich, intelligent; a work filled with great characters and an intriguing plot. But, even so,  what a thing to say - the greatest novel. In whose opinion, exactly? Mine that's all. Oh yes, and the guy who wrote the lead review at Amazon.com . And a few others. Read on Katherine, I'd love to know what you think. Novels are a form of entertainment but they are so much more than that. Novels and films are the two principal ways in which our society deals with ideas. Philosophers a...

Image (c) BBC 2002 Over the last couple of days I have watched the 2002 BBC adaptation of George Eliot's Daniel Deronda . I've always admired George Eliot, and always regarded  Middlemarch as probably the greatest English novel of the Victorian era. I've read others of her works from time to time but never Daniel Deronda . In fact I had hardly heard of it. So finding this DVD was a little like a Shakespeare afficionado never being familiar with  Hamlet,  before stumbling onto it via a TV adaptation. Shame on me.  The principal female character, Gwendolyn is very reminiscent of   Middlemarch 's Rosamond. Some of the themes of the book also echo those of Middlemarch : Spirtual wealth vs material wealth; the nature of love; great love thwarted by circumstance and the machinations of others; class; and, pre-eminently, the ability of women to live lives uncontolled by men. Daniel Deronda includes also, as a major theme, the relationship of Jews and Gentiles and it's no ...