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Alan Bray
- Mar 16
- 4 min
Sex And The City - Justine
The history of the city of Alexandria, Egypt is one of frequent conquest by different empires. The British took over in 1881 and remained...
Alan Bray
- Mar 9
- 5 min
Justine
Today, let’s talk about Justine, Lawrence Durrell’s 1957 book that begins his four-novel opus, The Alexandria Quartet. The other novels...
Alan Bray
- Mar 2
- 4 min
The Moved Heart - The Cat's Table
If you wanted to write a story about the adventures of an eleven-year-old boy taking a journey to a new home on an ocean liner in the...
Alan Bray
- Feb 23
- 5 min
The Seductiveness Of Cigarettes and Coffee - The Cat's Table
So in The Cat’s Table, is one of the memories that the narrator has about his younger self a memory of sexual awakening—the time when he...
Alan Bray
- Feb 16
- 3 min
View Out The Back - The Cat's Table
Last time, we talked about the omniscience of the narrator in Cat’s Table. The narrator, the older Canadian writer originally from Sri...
Alan Bray
- Feb 9
- 3 min
Ark of the Story Arc. Ack! - Cat's Table
The Cat’s Table, like other stories by Michael Ondaatje, is episodic in structure. The term episodic fiction refers to a set of episodes...
Alan Bray
- Feb 2
- 4 min
The Cat's Table
This week, a new novel, Michael Ondaatje’s 2011 The Cat’s Table. It is the story of an adult narrator telling the story of a voyage taken...
Alan Bray
- Jan 26
- 4 min
Breakfast On The Morning Train
The Unconsoled begins with Ryder, a famous pianist, arriving in an unnamed European city to perform a concert. Through more than five...
Alan Bray
- Jan 19
- 5 min
The Unconsoled Narrator
One of the features of Ishiguro’s Unconsoled is that it makes use of two forms of narration. The story begins with close first-person...
Alan Bray
- Jan 12
- 4 min
Is Anyone Listening?
When I began this blog almost three years ago, I set out to write about particular features of stories I enjoyed, their narrational...
Alan Bray
- Jan 5
- 4 min
Crisis? What Crisis?
In Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled, just who are those who are unconsoled? The definition of the word “unconsoled” is a person or group...
Alan Bray
- Dec 29, 2022
- 3 min
What A Character!
My friends, what of the narrational style of The Unconsoled? After all, that’s what I typically write about. Most simply put, Unconsoled...
Alan Bray
- Dec 22, 2022
- 4 min
The Unconsoled
This week, a new story, best beloved, Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1995 novel, The Unconsoled. It is, essentially, the story of a concert pianist,...
Alan Bray
- Dec 15, 2022
- 4 min
Who Am I This Time?
In a further refinement of our journey with Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers, let’s look at some of the meanings the story contains. To...
Alan Bray
- Dec 8, 2022
- 4 min
What Did She Know, And When Did She Know It?
What is the narrational style of Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers? The first chapter begins in close third person and in simple past...
Alan Bray
- Dec 1, 2022
- 5 min
The Flamethrowers
“Valera had fallen back from his squadron and was cutting the wires of another rider’s lamp.” So begins Rachel Kushner’s 2013 novel The...
Alan Bray
- Nov 24, 2022
- 4 min
Creatures - Amongst Women
In Amongst Women, John McGahern—like any writer—tells the story using a particular narrational style. Let’s consider the opening...
Alan Bray
- Nov 17, 2022
- 4 min
What Kind Of Fool Am I? - Amongst Women
Who am I? That’s a question that self-reflective people ask themselves again and again as they move through life. The answer is more than...
Alan Bray
- Nov 10, 2022
- 5 min
Rose - Amongst Women
Immediately after the section in Amongst Women that depicts the last meeting between Moran and McQuaid, there is a paragraph break. Then...
Alan Bray
- Nov 3, 2022
- 3 min
Old Friends - Amongst Women
Last week, we started thinking about the structure of Amongst Women—the way it establishes a present time at the beginning when Michael...