Edgar Allan Poe

Tuesday

11 July 2023

An old man remembers: The Librarianist, by Patrick deWitt, reviewed

It’s a mark of how difficult Patrick deWittis to pigeonhole that I’m tempted to reach for reductive mash-ups to sell you his winning fifth novel. The lovechild of Elizabeth Strout and Wes Anderson? Katherine Heiny meets the Coen Brothers? It’s not quite any of that. On the surface, The Librarianist is his most conventional narrative yet (the Man Booker shortlisted The Sisters Brothers was an absurdist western; his other novels are similarly left field). A chance encounter leads the friendless, but ‘not unhappy per se’, retired librarian Bob Comet to volunteer at the Gambell-Reed Senior Center, where he forges new bonds and reflects on his past. But it’s odder and funnier than that suggests. For a start, the narrative arc is all over the place.

Wednesday

29 April 2020

Bill Kauffman

What can we learn about coronavirus from classic cinema?

From our US edition

Batavia, New York With the first blizzard of every winter I take John Greenleaf Whittier’s Snow-Bound off the bookshelf, and though I never quite make it through to the end, when the snow is ‘melted in the genial glow’, I feel as if I have hunkered down for the week with the ‘Barefoot Boy’ poet’s besieged shut-ins. So when the Kung Flu — excuse me; I forgot for a moment that mild humor is now as verboten as sweaty raves and square dances — kicked its way into our lives, but before the local library shut down, I, like everyone else — well, like a tiny sliver of the populace — reached for Camus’s...Camus’s...oh, the hell with it: The Plague by Albert Camus.