by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Dec 29, 2008 | journeys, shapes, truth |
In July, I read Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk, a writer I’d never read before. Upon finishing the novel, I immediately wanted to reread it. Instead, I began a journey that has lasted four months: reading each of Rachel Cusk’s books in the order she...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Nov 26, 2008 | life, shapes |
In Remembering the Bone House, Nancy Mairs writes, “Here I develop that ability to concatenate events which characterizes human consciousness and makes ‘daily life’ possible.” I had to look it up. To concatenate is to link together, as in a...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Nov 19, 2008 | journeys, reviews, shapes |
If I weren’t reading all of Rachel Cusk’s books to look at how her writing develops over time, I would not have finished her sixth book, In the Fold, published in 2005. As one reviewer wrote, “too little happened to too many people.” Or...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Nov 14, 2008 | novels, reviews, shapes |
For anyone who enjoyed Gilead, Marilynne Robinson’s second novel, which won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, you will love her new novel, Home. For she has just crossed town, so to speak, and turned around to tell us the story from a different porch. On...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Oct 28, 2008 | reviews, shapes, truth |
The Lucky Ones is Rachel Cusk’s fifth book. In it, there is a Contents page, which announces five sections. Each section stands by itself. There is a passing reference in each section to at least one character in another section. With a lovely circularity,...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Oct 23, 2008 | memory, shapes, truth |
Charles Frazier’s second book,Thirteen Moons, is narrated by Will Cooper, who has a friend named Bear, a Cherokee Indian chief. “I cannot decide whether it is an illness or a sin, the need to write things down and fix the flowing world in one rigid form. ...
