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Alan Bray
- Apr 8, 2021
- 4 min
Road Running
What is the plot in Remains? Well, what is plot? “The main events of a play, novel, movie, or similar work, devised and presented by the...
Alan Bray
- Apr 1, 2021
- 3 min
Methods of Movement
In a 1986 Guardian interview, (pre-Remains), Ishiguro writes that he was dissatisfied with his early novels because he judged them as...
Alan Bray
- Mar 25, 2021
- 4 min
Isn’t It a Lovely Day?
Last week, I began our discussion of The Remains of the Day by saying that we’d sniffed out another unreliable narrator—Mr. Stevens, the...
Alan Bray
- Mar 18, 2021
- 4 min
The Remains of the Day
This week, a new story, Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1988 The Remains of the Day. (Whiny voice: This week, a new story, Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the...
Alan Bray
- Mar 11, 2021
- 3 min
The Perils of Smooth Jazz
One of the hallmarks of fiction, one of the things that often keeps us reading, is how the protagonist transforms in the story. Aristotle...
Alan Bray
- Mar 4, 2021
- 4 min
Unreliable and Not In Control—Bad Combination
I have written about how Pat is an unreliable narrator in Silver Linings. The unnamed narrator presents Pat’s story as a sort of journal...
Alan Bray
- Feb 25, 2021
- 4 min
I Don't Believe You
I have said that, in Silver Linings, Pat is an unreliable narrator. Let’s look at this more closely. An unreliable narrator is a narrator...
Alan Bray
- Feb 18, 2021
- 4 min
The Silver Linings Playbook
This week a new story, Matthew Quick’s 2008 novel, The Silver Linings Playbook. I first read the book six years ago after seeing the...
Alan Bray
- Feb 11, 2021
- 4 min
Aren't You a Little Obsessed?
What role does transformation play in Grand Central? Transformation is a key element of fiction and of memoir. “A transformation is a...
Alan Bray
- Feb 4, 2021
- 3 min
Lily Eater
Last week, I wrestled mightily with the question of whether Grand Central is a memoir or a work of fiction, deciding that the story seems...
Alan Bray
- Jan 28, 2021
- 4 min
I Remember We
‘Kay. I have said that, this week, we should examine Grand Central as a work of fiction. I felt good about the clarity, not exactly smug,...
Alan Bray
- Jan 21, 2021
- 3 min
The Thing In Itself?
A week of sleepless nights, best beloved. I’ve been struggling with Grand Central. The personal nature of the story, a possibly...
Alan Bray
- Jan 14, 2021
- 5 min
By Grand Central Station I Lay Down and Wept
A new book this week, Elizabeth Smart’s 1945 novella, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, weighing in at one-hundred and twelve...
Alan Bray
- Jan 7, 2021
- 3 min
This Is the End, My Only Friend
The ending of The Moslem Wife tells us what the story is about—the point—if you will. We talked last week about how the style of the...
Alan Bray
- Dec 31, 2020
- 4 min
Stylin’
What is the style of The Moslem Wife? By way of review, fictional style can be thought of as the implied author, an entity who mediates...
Alan Bray
- Dec 24, 2020
- 3 min
Startling Developments
From the outset, the Narrator entity of The Moslem Wife expresses cutting judgements of the characters, skewering their vanities and...
Alan Bray
- Dec 17, 2020
- 3 min
The Moslem Wife
A new story this week, dear friends, The Moslem Wife by Mavis Gallant, first published in The New Yorker in 1976. The story is included...
Alan Bray
- Dec 10, 2020
- 4 min
Migration
An interesting thing to note about Lion is that four of the characters—Patrick, Hana, Caravaggio, and Clara—appear in Ondaatje’s next...
Alan Bray
- Dec 3, 2020
- 4 min
Poorly Drawn Boy
In The Skin of a Lion has not one but two scenes in which Patrick Lewis is sketched. Early in the story, his father Hazen “outlined the...
Alan Bray
- Nov 26, 2020
- 4 min
In Which I Define Life
In a previous post having to do with a different book, I wrote about What Do You Do When I Can’t See You—that phenomena in fiction of the...