MixedTimes Literary Supplement (UK)Paul and Catherine feel far less embodied than Elio and Oliver. Their sexual encounters are largely sublimated, left in the blank spaces between sections ... Many of the descriptions are perfunctory: the clothes they wear, the food they eat. We are frequently told how charmed they are by each other, an attraction Aciman asks us to take at face value ... Still, one suspects that Aciman knows what he is doing. Transfer Room on the Sea to the screen, cast Patricia Clarkson and Stanley Tucci in the lead roles, and the lack of layered interiority will become less important. And the central question of whether the lovers go to Naples together might have higher stakes.
Lucasta Miller
MixedThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)If there is little to surprise here, the reader is rewarded with Miller’s attention to Keats’s language, his formal choices and poetic experiments ... Miller’s sharp eye for the neologisms for which Keats was reprimanded by reviewers...provides yet another point of contact between Keats and his contemporary, John Clare. Elsewhere, the writer’s own language is less attentive. The conclusion of Miller’s chapter on \'Ode to a Nightingale\' settles the poem in this way: \'Whether drug-induced or not, the text certainly shows him writing in a state of self-aware creative autopilot, devoid of the over-thinking which is so apparent in Endymion. The words just come to him, unimpeded\'. Such a conclusion flattens the contours of curiosity, and one wonders what Helen Vendler—who proposed the sequence as \'controlled experiments in sensation\'—would make of it.
Jonathan Bate
MixedThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)... if Bright Star, Green Light gives Fitzgerald literary depth, it offers no great insight on Keats ... These are considerable connections, but a nagging feeling of convenience and, occasionally, gracelessness, remains.
