Category Archives: Picture novels

Michael Ondaatje’s Billy the Kid

Posted on November 28, 2013 by Patrick Lennon

Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is not really a novel and not really a volume of poetry either. It’s less than a hundred pages long and most of those consist of only a few lines of … Continue reading →

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Important Artifacts etc.

Posted on October 18, 2013 by Patrick Lennon

There are good ideas that turn out to be good ideas, like the paper clip, or the safety pin. And then there are those good ideas that turn out to be not so good, like the automatic seat belt in … Continue reading →

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Invisible pictures (1): Don DeLillo’s The Angel Esmeralda

Posted on April 15, 2012 by Patrick Lennon

There’s a review in the TLS this week of Don DeLillo’s 2011 collection of short stories The Angel Esmeralda (published in the UK by Picador). It’s surprising that the review should only be appearing now since the book was published … Continue reading →

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Don DeLillo at Yankee Stadium?

Posted on March 15, 2012 by Patrick Lennon

As the couples pour into the stadium in their thousands – the “bridegrooms in identical blue suits, the brides in lace-and-satin gowns” – , ‘Rodge’ and his wife Maureen, armed with a pair of binoculars, scan the crowd from their … Continue reading →

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Alain de Botton’s Kiss and Tell

Posted on March 7, 2012 by Patrick Lennon

There was a short piece in The Guardian last week in which the author, Daniel Kalder, draws attention to works that writers themselves – and not governments, say – have tried to ‘suppress’. The examples Kalder gives in ‘When writers censor themselves‘ … Continue reading →

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Michel Faber’s The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps

Posted on March 1, 2012 by Patrick Lennon

Michel Faber’s 2001 novella The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps (Canongate, 2001) centres on a 34-year-old parchment and paper conservator named Siân who is spending some time on an archaeological dig at Whitby Abbey in North Yorkshire. During her stay, she … Continue reading →

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Barbara Hodgson’s The Tattooed Map

Posted on December 21, 2011 by Patrick Lennon

I’m always amazed at what I can come across in second-hand bookshops. Today I found a copy of the heavily illustrated / documented first novel The Tattoed Map by the Canadian novelist Barbara Hodgson. First published in 1995, a year … Continue reading →

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Don DeLillo’s Mao II and Johan Grimonprez’s dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y

Posted on November 16, 2011 by Patrick Lennon

It opened just over a month ago, on 15 October, and although I haven’t found time to go to it, I thought it might be worth mentioning already. I’m talking about the retrospective exhibition of work by Johan Grimonprez entitled It’s … Continue reading →

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Nadja in French, and Nadja in English

Posted on November 9, 2011 by Patrick Lennon

It is a well-known fact of course that something gets lost when you read a work in translation, but sometimes the loss can be greater than expected. Take André Breton’s Nadja, for instance. To the best of my knowledge, the … Continue reading →

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Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time

Posted on October 31, 2011 by Patrick Lennon

The only curious thing about Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is that it actually was a critical and popular success when it was published in 2003, selling millions of copies and winning a number … Continue reading →

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