Category: death-and-dying

I Believe the Word is Entropy
Molloy from Three Novels by Samuel Beckett. Grove Press. 407 pp. $15.95. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a stranger book than Molloy, the first novel in the famous trilogy that Samuel Beckett published in his early forties. It makes no sense whatsoever, especially in its first eighty-five pages. It concerns a man—the eponymous narrator—who has ...
Read more
Lost Souls
Home by Marilynne Robinson. Picador. 325pp. $14.00 I have now read all three novels of what I suppose might be called the Gilead trilogy, Gilead itself, Home, and Lila. I unfortunately read them out of order, Lila first. I also read them when I was moving out of a tiny apartment and back into our renovated ...
Read more
Gilead
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. Picador. 247 pp. $16.00 This novel has an almost irresistible premise for me: an older father writing to his son about the past life that he’ll never have a chance to discuss with him, since he expects to have died by the time then son gets interested. My own father died when ...
Read more
Portrait of the Artist as a Bulldog
Mr. Turner. A film by Mike Leigh. There’s a lot not to like in Mr. Turner, Mike Leigh’s biopic of the British artist J.M. W. Turner (Timothy Spall). The man is often gruff and uncommunicative. He is especially so with his housekeeper, Hannah Danby (Dorothy Atkinson), who obviously worships him and would do anything for him, ...
Read more