Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (2020)

Could the ultimate measure of a novel, be ‘veracity’? That fiction – prose defined by not being real – must, first and foremost, be real – is one of those quirks of art that make art ‘art’. Fiction that is implausible, or too shallow, or insufficiently sophisticated, that is, for want of a better word, basic, that is lacking the texture and rough angles of the real world, where consequences are vague, effects of causes unlikely, and in which no one has any skin in the game – this is bad fiction.

onehundredpages.wordpress.com

Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy by John le Carré (1974)

“John Le Carré new book -- his seventh in thirteen years -- is a thoroughly enjoyable English spy novel about the discovery of a double agent at the highest level of the British Intelligence bureaucracy. It reconfirms the impression that Le Carré belongs to the select company of such spy and detective story writers as Arthur Conan Doyle and Graham Greene in England and Dashiell Hammett, James M.

onehundredpages.wordpress.com

The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald (1995)

When an author’s meaning is hard to decipher there may be one of two things going on – it’s poorly written, or it’s very cleverly written. This problem is consequent of the reader wanting to / needing to work things out, and so the author’s effort to obfuscate. The question is – is the obfuscation deliberate or not. But either way – a balance needs to be struck.

onehundredpages.wordpress.com

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee (2017)

Here we have a ‘rich story of the immigrant experience’, one which is a ‘vivid, immersive multigenerational saga about life for Koreans in Japan’, as well as a ‘tale of resilience and poignant emotional conflict’, one which Barack Obama no less accounts ‘a powerful story’. It is a New York Times best seller, receiving great reviews from The New York Times, The Guardian, The Irish Times – describing it as ‘a masterpiece of empathy’ – on the "Best Fiction of 2017" lists from Esquire, the BBC, the Washington Post, named by The New York Times as one of the 10 Best Books of 2017, and thengetting on The New York Times' 100 Best Books of the 21st Century list.

onehundredpages.wordpress.com

The Gallows Pole by Benjamin Myers (2017)

Do we need more historical fiction? More history? Haven’t we got enough? These, and other ridiculous questions, hint at what historical fiction is for. And what it is not for. Does Myers set out to Dick-Turpin-ise King David Hartley, chief of The Cragg Vale Coiners, who runs, briefly and badly, a successful coining business and protection racket? Or is there something more interesting going on here?

onehundredpages.wordpress.com

Émile Zola: over 2.5 million words of essential reading for any self-respecting modern person. 

Realism One of the great novelists of European critical-realist fiction – Émile Zola – really takes it up a gear when he sits down to write about stuff that never happened, first putting pen to paper in 1871. This really is the great project of our time: telling it like it is – as opposed tom telling it how we wish it was, or in some other way gaslighting your reader.

onehundredpages.wordpress.com

Why would anyone read all 2.5 million words of Zola’s twenty-volume Rougon-Macquart Novel Series?

Reading fiction at all can seem, to some people, an odd thing to do. For it is, if you think about it, an odd thing to do. But then, some people watch tv, some people listen to podcasts, even about things that are not real. And we all look at our phones: isn’t reading a book somehow similar to watching a whole load of TikTok videos one after another?

onehundredpages.wordpress.com

The Top 20 of Zola Novels 

On reading the whole of Zola’s Rougon-Macquart Novel Series (1871-1893) – fifteen of them this year – it has become apparent that some are nowhere near as good as others. Leaving aside his other works of fiction – including the excellent but non-RM ‘Thérèse Raquin’, this is my top 20: 1 – Nana (1880) 2 – The Ladies’ Paradise (1883)

onehundredpages.wordpress.com

Doctor Pascal by Émile Zola (1893)

This is the twentieth and final novel of his Rougon-Macquart series – all showing how heredity and environment can be used to explain how members of one family come to a sticky end over the course of the Second Empire: 1851-1870. However, what it became instead is a defining critique of the newly realised bourgeois class, characterised by the obsessive accumulation of stuff, of wealth, especially property, the neurotic building up of inherited equity, including all other aspects of material wealth, in order to acquire social position defined almost exclusively by this same accumulation.

onehundredpages.wordpress.com

The Dream by Émile Zola (1888)

Angélique – the protagonist for this novel – is a fairy tale type character with all the depth of a children’s fairy story – but this doesn’t lend itself to Zola’s naturalistic and scientific approach: how doe you write a late nineteenth century realistic novel about a character living out the life of a medieval story book? As with ‘The Sin of Abbé Mouret of thirteen years before, Zola struggles with characters with no real purchase on the real world: the wheels come off when his psychology goes ‘off road’.

onehundredpages.wordpress.com

The Sin of Abbé Mouret by Émile Zola (1875)

In this the fifth novel in the Rougon-Macquart series, Zola focuses on the church and the clash of celibacy and sexuality, how unnatural it is: how the church perverts sexuality and what it means to be a physical human being. However, Zola nonetheless has a thoroughly catholic view of sexuality and virginity, or purity and goodness, and gets bogged down in this, much to a modern reader’s bemusement – though this soon turns to frustration – did anyone ever really obsesses about this stuff in such a shallow way?

onehundredpages.wordpress.com

The Conquest of Plassans by Émile Zola (1874)

With the Rougons back once more in their ancestral home of rural Provence, they can truly be their bourgeois best: small minded, underhand, selfish, corrupt and fatally flawed. Though there are more infamous bourgeois beasts in Zola – such as Octave Mouret in the he tenth novel ‘Pot-Bouille’ or ‘Pot Luck’ and the eleventh novel ‘The Ladies' Paradise’ – it is those in Zola’s Plassans – based on his home town in the rural and sun scorched Midi – Aix-en-Provence – who seem to be the most contemptible.

onehundredpages.wordpress.com

The Tattered Cloak by Nina Berberova

These ‘searing, evocative stories’ are said to be ‘as graceful and subtle as Chekhov’. They are certainly unusual and full of sentences that will give the reader pause. I guess this is what passes as thought-provoking – something which fiction that you read for plot doesn’t make you do – that is think. What ‘good writing’ – the clearest of easily read limpid prose – can eschew – getting the reader stuck, making him uncomfortable, or getting her to question her preconceptions, ways of reading / looking at the world/ herself… changing how we think.

onehundredpages.wordpress.com

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke (2006)

A pretty damning review: “For a book with such promise, Yesteryear is a real lesson in not allowing a fun premise to get in the way of a good story.” But when we consider novels in terms of what’s missing, we are necessarily spoilt for choice. Because when a novelist writes a novel they are choosing, and choosing is excluding, and necessarily, omitting a lot more than is included.

onehundredpages.wordpress.com

Less by Andrew Sean Greer (2018)

What does it take to be a Pulitzer-winning novel? From Harper Lee’s ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ in 1961, John Cheever’s stories in 1979, Philip Roth’s ‘The Ghost Writer’, John Kennedy Toole’s ‘A Confederacy of Dunces’, John Updike’s ‘Rabbit Is Rich’, Marilynne Robinson’s ‘Housekeeping’, Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple’ to Toni Morrison’s ‘Beloved’(a pretty good period in the 1980s), and back to Philip Roth again in the 1990s, for ‘Operation Shylock’ and ‘Sabbath's Theatre’ and ‘American Pastoral’, as well as Carol Shields’ ‘The Stone Diaries’ and Richard Ford’s ‘Independence Day’; latterly Don DeLillo’s ‘Underworld’, Michael Cunningham ‘s ‘The Hours’, Jonathan Franzen’s ‘The Corrections’, Edward P.

onehundredpages.wordpress.com

Queen - Radio Ga Ga (Live Aid 1985)

YouTube video by Live Aid

youtu.be

Ubik by Philip K. Dick (1969)

Why do we read science fiction? Why do we read anything? It’s hard to know at times. When you pick up a book such as this – which is so overwhelmingly silly,. Surely, it can only have a charm for those of us who read it in our distant childhoods. Is science fiction just for kids? There is the notion that Sci-Fi is the great "literature of ideas” of the 20th century – Big Brother, the feelies< Handmaids and all that – where big ideas are explored in all their complex human, technological, and social ramifications.

onehundredpages.wordpress.com

Across Sicily With Garibaldi’s Thousand by Tim Parks (2026)

Some writer’s are just such pleasant company. So erudite and what once was called wise – but might better be called subtle. Or sensitive. Or aware. Such as the incomparable W G Sebald. Who, it turns out, bears comparison to Parks, when he sets off on a trek, and bringing you, the reader, with him, regales you with such a riveting account of anything at all – but with Parks it’s one pretty intense, pretty odd, pretty fascinating story – just how did Garibaldi do it – what we know he did – but that was, beforehand, and whilst he was attempting it, a seemingly impossible feat – the improbable defeat the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, with his rag tag army of men committed to the cause.

onehundredpages.wordpress.com

Joe Jackson - Steppin' Out

YouTube video by JoeJacksonVEVO

m.youtube.com

The Writer’s Path – following fact and fiction with Tim Parks

How do master storytellers approach the act of walking in their writing? What are the subtle yet important differences between crafting a non-fiction travelogue and weaving walking into a fictional na...

wlc.zone

V13 by Emmanuel Carrère (2022)

Ever since he wrote ‘The Moustache’ (1988), a profoundly good and original work of fiction, he’s been banging out non-fiction titles: ‘I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K. Dick’ (2005), ‘The Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous Deception’ (2002), ‘My Life as a Russian Novel (2010), which I’ve yet to read, ‘Other Lives But Mine’ (2012), ‘Limonov’ (2015), ‘The Kingdom: A Novel’(2017) – though not a novel – and now this – an account of the November 2015 Paris attacks, known as V13 in France because they took place on Friday (vendredi) the 13th.

onehundredpages.wordpress.com