Category: Uncategorised
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It feels somehow fitting not to have found an appropriate quote to begin with from Flesh, given how its whole style of narrative seems so geared towards communicating… nothing much? The story opens with an affair – if we can call it that – between a 15-year-old Hungarian named István and his much older married…
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“In the darkness, the fallen coconuts all around us glimmered like skulls.” A girl is smuggled across the water from Trinidad to Venezuela, in the bottom of a boat, in the middle of the night. Why? And who is she? Thus opens Love Forms, full of promise. Then, the story quickly becomes… surprisingly uneventful? The…
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“I was about to turn seventeen, and at that age, what did I really know about time?” The South is, at its heart, a touching coming-of-age story set among a Chinese immigrant family in 1990s Malaysia. The book opens (perhaps slightly jarringly?) with a liaison between its two young male protagonists, Jay and Chuan. I…
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“The personal is anything that affects me. Everything else is political. And identity politics is whatever affects you, but not me.” What is the zeitgeist of these strange times, and what “universality” of human experience does it point to? This is, I think, the central premise of Brown’s second novel, its cast of characters to…
The Booker Review 