About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Julia Boyd, Angelika Patel
Rave iNews (UK) Boyd is an outstanding micro-historian. Assisted by Oberstdorf resident Angelika Patel, she gives us the finest of fine detail to demonstrate how village residents defied the regime when and where they could.
John Higgs
Positive iNews (UK) On the face of it, it is a compare and contrast exercise which shouldn’t work at all well. But in Higgs’s hands it becomes strikingly insightful ... In Love and Let Die, he gives us page after page of glorious anecdotes about Bond and The Beatles, revelations about one sparking insights into the other ... If there is a flaw with Love and Let Die it is that Higgs makes his central argument and supports it persuasively early on. He draws upon Freud’s primal drives of Eros (Love) and Thanatos (Death). In the popular imagination, Higgs says, The Beatles became intertwined with Eros and Bond with Thanatos. This leaves him without much further intellectual territory to explore.
Cormac McCarthy
Positive iNews (UK) McCarthy always pushes at the boundaries of literature to try to give us fresh perspectives on the human condition. In what might be the 89-year-old’s swansong, he melds literature into philosophy, as Alicia unpacks the fundamentals of existence ... If McCarthy is a writer of limitless ambition, Alicia is a very ambitious construction. It’s an open question, however, whether her off-the-scale attributes signal McCarthy’s lack of interest in creating a more relatable female protagonist ... A curious novel, but you have to love McCarthy for it. It is complex but affecting. Its author, as he approaches his tenth decade, gives a masterly demonstration of how with age comes not greater wisdom, but a greater awareness of its limits.
Cormac McCarthy
Mixed iNews (UK) This is a thriller of unusually high literary quality. But it becomes clear that the story around the wrecked jet is merely one of several strands of a novel that is far from straightforward ... McCarthy’s books are strikingly immersive and, in The Passenger, he makes New Orleans come alive ... Whether the novel’s narrative threads cohere is doubtful. On the face of it, there are three novellas here, welded together haphazardly: together with the thriller and the tragedy of Alicia, there is the story of Western’s own existential torments. There must be a suspicion that it is an unsatisfactory work-in-progress which McCarthy has finished off as best he can so that it can be published during his lifetime ... It becomes clear, however, that Western is as much on the run from himself as anyone else, seeking redemption while remaining at war with God. This gives McCarthy free rein for what is, above all else, his forte: luminously elegiac writing – whether concerning loss of life, of livelihood, or of innocence.
Andrew Miller
Mixed iNews (UK) Andrew Miller is one of our finest writers. Few can match his sensitivity of touch, eye for telling detail and acute feel for setting ... The passages in The Slowworm’s Song describing Rose’s military duty are impeccably researched and viscerally real ... Unfortunately, The Slowworm’s Song is not as outstanding as its predecessor. There are problems with the depiction of its central character ... In his refined sensibilities and profound insight, Rose is rather too close to his creator ... Moreover, the framing of the story around the letter and the deferred details of the dreadful incident in Rose’s past seem insufficient support for the novel’s sprawling character study of his troubled inner world – though it must be said that the narrative’s digressions do faithfully reflect his personal chaos.
Werner Herzog, trans. by Michael Hofmann
Rave iNews (UK) Herzog sidelines moral issues – Onoda terrorised Lubang’s residents and killed several during his extended warfare. Instead, he tries to inhabit Onoda’s mind. The result is a visionary narrative ... This is Herzog’s debut novel – and it is beautifully crafted, a literary jewel set to sparkle against the backdrop of his monumental career in cinema.
Dave Eggers
Mixed i (UK) Successful satire majors on ideas and insights, and the imagination of Eggers runs riot to dazzling effect in his first couple of hundred pages. Alas, he doesn’t quit while he is ahead, instead continuing for more than 300 more. Consequently, the novel begins to flag and sag. Plot twists become predictable, and characters never credibly develop. Nevertheless Eggers does us a service in underlining the sinister directions tech is taking.
Michael Pollan
Positive i (UK) ... a tour around three substances: caffeine, mescaline and opium ... Pollan offers us rich historical contexts for them that are often surprising ... Pollan’s summation of his three substances of choice is that they \'hold up mirrors to our deepest human needs and aspirations, the operation of our minds, and our entanglement with the natural world\'. These are large claims, but in the main he justifies them.
Tom McCarthy
Positive The Independent (UK) C is notable for description which can approach the eidetic. Near the start comes a luminous account of the silk works, but some of the finest writing depicts the carnage of the Front ... McCarthy has researched extensively such recondite areas as seances, opium dens and Central European spas, but the novel\'s deployment of avant-garde ideas is equally prominent ... In C he continues to mine artistic movements from the past century to produce arresting literature for this one. Carrefax remains an essentially enigmatic personality throughout: the novel\'s title, indeed, underlines his status as cipher. This lack of affect demonstrates McCarthy\'s ongoing debt to Alain Robbe-Grillet and the nouveau roman, but perhaps more influential here is the idealism of the Futurists concerning speed, technology and violence, together with their repudiation of humanism ... Issues of motifs aside, C is formidably well assembled and it is admirable for an unashamed literary ambition.
Karl Geary
Rave The Financial Times ...an unforgettable love story in writing that is often exceptional ... Unusually, the entire tale is presented in the second person. When used for more than short passages this narrative approach can become strained. Yet here any potential over-intensity is offset by the measured pace of Sonny’s thoughts and insights, and the combination works wonderfully well. Geary’s flair for visual description helps ... Occasionally there is unnecessary telling when showing has sufficed, with pathos intruding into Geary’s beautifully wrought scenes ... Even so, Geary captures time and place startlingly well. More important, he lays out the inexorable dynamic of this tragic relationship with masterly economy.