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Alan Bray
- Jul 8, 2021
- 4 min
The Elephant in the Room
First, a personal note. For the first time in some sixty weeks, my blog did not have a new entry last Thursday. Readers were, I know,...
Alan Bray
- Jun 24, 2021
- 5 min
Olive Kitteridge
This week, a new book, Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, published in 2008. Ms. Strout won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for...
Alan Bray
- Jun 17, 2021
- 4 min
Camera Obscura
I have said that, in Emigrants, Max Sebald relied for content on the stories of real people, including an unnamed narrator who was...
Alan Bray
- Jun 10, 2021
- 4 min
Laugh or Cry—Your Choice?
The last section in Emigrants is entitled Max Ferber. Here, our narrator is a youth in his early twenties who escapes life in Germany...
Alan Bray
- Jun 3, 2021
- 4 min
Memory Lane
The third section of Emigrants, Ambros Adelwarth, is all about revenants, people who return, people who are thought of as dead but come...
Alan Bray
- May 27, 2021
- 4 min
Hall of Mirrors
Last week, I wrote about how Emigrants can be seen as the story of a narrator’s reactions to encounters with four different people—except...
Alan Bray
- May 20, 2021
- 4 min
Make It Real Compared to What
A theme I’d like to pursue in thinking about this remarkable book, is that Emigrants is (among other things) about the effect on the...
Alan Bray
- May 13, 2021
- 4 min
Fiction and Other Facts
In Amazon’s system of classification, Emigrants is found under literature and biography, and the promotion says the book combines...
Alan Bray
- May 6, 2021
- 4 min
The Emigrants
This week, a new story, The Emigrants by the late German author W.G. Sebald. I’m reading Michael Hulse’s 1996 translation of the 1992...
Alan Bray
- Apr 29, 2021
- 6 min
Time Travel
The last chapter of Remains is entitled Weymouth. It begins with Mr. Stevens sitting on a pier, or boardwalk, by the sea, waiting for the...
Alan Bray
- Apr 22, 2021
- 4 min
Mr. Stevens and St. Peter
Although Mr. Stevens spends considerable time reflecting on the past during his journey, he is at times confronted by people from the...
Alan Bray
- Apr 15, 2021
- 4 min
Stevens the Obscure
Remains has an interesting structure. As I have said, the novel is broken up into a prologue and seven chapters, each one identified by a...
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...