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  1. Culture
17 October 2011updated 27 Sep 2015 4:03am

Reviews round-up

The critics' verdicts on Jeffrey Eugenides, Joseph Brodsky, Francine Stock and Stephen Hughes.

By Staff Blogger

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

Jeffrey Eugenides has written his first novel since the Pulitzer Prize-winning Middlesex. “Jeffrey Eugenides’ third novel begins in the early 1980s on a prestigious university campus,” writes Katy Guest in the Independent. “Madeleine is loved by Mitchell Grammaticus, a spiritual-curious theologian, but she falls for the mercurial Leonard Bankhead … The problem is (finds Madeleine), intellectually deconstructing love does not prevent her from falling head over heels with Leonard in the manner of an ingénue in an English novel.”

In the New York Times, William Deresiewicz writes that The Marriage Plot is “about what Eugenides’s books are always about, no matter how they differ: the drama of coming of age”. It is especially great on “what happens after you graduate, when the whole scaffolding of classes and the college social scene you’ve been training your personality around is suddenly taken away, and you have to grope for a new way to be in the world.”

Leo Robson writes in the New Statesman that “Eugenides, it appears, is out to charm … The novel’s language does not pretend to find things elusive or impregnable. Again and again, Eugenides picks up a subject … or a process … and sprints with it for an immaculate paragraph, flicking off a lively list of impressions.” The novel “culminates in a gesture of completion that is in fact one of self-combustion, like the closing move of a Coen brothers film – the novel confirming its identity as divertissement, game or ruse.”

Guest concludes that “Eugenides takes many risks. Writing humorously about literary theory is always hard to pull off. Likewise, focusing on characters as difficult to get on with as Madeleine and Leonard could easily go wrong … [the novel is] a remarkable achievement.”

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Less Than One by Joseph Brodsky

Nicholas Lezard writes in the Guardian that “these essays, collected and published in 1986, won the National Book Critics’ award for criticism; and a year later he became the then youngest ever Nobel literary laureate”. Lesley McDowell observes in the Independent that “this collection begins with Brodsky’s memories of growing up in the Soviet Union and progresses through his love of literature … The loss of individuality is a loss prevented by art [and] by poetry.”

According to the New York Times: “Admittedly, [Brodsky] is one of millions with such stories. Yet his story is unique because only he, among millions, chose to write it … A person is, in Brodsky’s title essay, less than one: He is never the sum of his experiences, since he is always in dialogue with, and beholden to, his past and future selves … It is an allegory for the state of the writer, too, since language fails to communicate everything.”

Lezard comments that “Brodsky wasn’t even writing (or speaking) in his native language [which] makes this even better somehow. He certainly has a gift for the striking phrase … Brodsky seems to write as if conscious that he is addressing an audience which needs to be brought up to speed from a standing start, yet without insulting their intelligence.”

In Glorious Technicolor: A Century of Film and How it Has Shaped Us by Francine Stock with Stephen Hughes

Philip French writes in the Observer that “Francine Stock, a former BBC TV current affairs reporter and now presenter of Radio 4’s The Film Programme, has taken on the hugely ambitious project of a historical survey of the movies from … the 1890s to this very year.” Christopher Fowler asks in the Independent: “How and why do movies affect audiences, and what do they tell us about the times in which they’re made? … Stock’s approach is to examine three key films from each decade, picking them apart to understand their influence, and adding examples along the way.”

Fowler notes that “if the intention is to show that cinema’s practitioners have manipulated us with ever-changing agendas, the chronology is far from exhaustive, so perhaps this is best approached as a personal history peppered with pleasurable asides.” By contrast, French writes that “it is not a deeply personal book. The passing remarks on Stock’s own life rarely get more revealing than watching Chinatown at the age of 16 in Guildford on the same day as the IRA pub bombings there in October 1974 … and there is little that is idiosyncratic about her choice of films.” Nonetheless, “there is much to enjoy in this book, and nuggets of information on recent cinematic developments to be mined”.

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