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Alan Bray
- 1 hour ago
- 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 from Sri Lanka to England by an eleven-year-old boy in the early 1950s. “The three weeks of the sea journey, as I originally remembered it, were placid. It is only now, years later, having been prompted by my children to describe the voyage, that it becomes an adventure, when seen through their eyes, even something significant in a life.” S
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 hundred pages of prose, much of it quoted speech, the hapless Ryder meets with continual delay and frustration as he approaches the night of this concert. He encounters a number of at best eccentric people in the city, some of whom he has known long ago. He learns that a civic group has invited him to perform, hoping his presence will help the
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 character narration with the protagonist, Ryder, describing things strictly from his perspective. Example, please. “The taxi driver seemed embarrassed to find there was no one—not even a clerk behind the reception desk—waiting to welcome me.” However, near the end of the first chapter, as we’ve described before, Ryder becomes omniscient, in tha
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 structures, themes, the way they developed plot and character. I did not want to do a sort of book report or review, “This book was very…good. The story was …interesting.” I’m making fun, but I wanted to write about books I’d already read once so I could focus on less obvious features and get away from a strictly emotional reaction. Thus, what pa
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 who is not consoled, consoled meaning to comfort (someone) at a time of grief or disappointment. So who in the story has experienced a time of grief or disappointment? Ryder, the protagonist, is an obvious candidate. There are suggestions that he has indeed had a traumatic past, and they become more explicit as the book goes on. However, he g
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 is told in first person, simple past tense. In contrast, critics have pointed out how Ishiguro’s other novels employ different modes of narration—within the same—usually first person–story. Thus, Remains of the Day makes use of a sort of travel brochure narration—an imitation of the kind of prose used in travel books—as well as an “oratorica
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, Ryder, who has come to an unnamed Central European city to perform a concert. I first read Unconsoled twenty years ago after enjoying Ishiguro’s other books and found it amazing and challenging. Some initial reviewers were rather negative—notably James Woods and Michiko Kakutani—but over time, the book’s strengths have become clear to most. It
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 summarize the narrational style: Ms. Kushner develops two characters, one is Valera, the Italian motorcycle enthusiast who begins the book during WW1. He is shown in close third person, a “he” and reappears in a significant chapter at the end of the book Then there is Reno, a young American woman who is shown as an “I,” ostensibly telling u
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 tense. “Valera had fallen back from his squadron…” This cues the reader that there is a narrator who is showing a story that has already occurred. This narrator—unnamed and apparently reliable—knows the story, knows the protagonist, Valera, inside and out, and also knows certain facts about other characters. “Copertini considered himself a bet
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 Flamethrowers. This first line follows a sentence-like title for the first chapter: “He killed him with a motorbike headlamp (what he had in his hand).” Preceding this is a dedication and a page displaying the Latin phrase: Fac ut Ardeat. This epigram is quite important to the process of making meaning of the story. It translates to English v
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 paragraph: “As he weakened, Moran became afraid of his daughters. This once powerful man was so implanted in their lives that they had never really left Great Meadow, in spite of jobs and marriages and children of their own in Dublin and London. Now they could not let him slip away.” Who is the subject thinking this and then writing it? Well, it’s s
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 a name; it is a persona that includes personality traits, abilities, physical attributes, interests, and social roles. I am the author of this blog. I am tall, interested in writing and reading. I am a husband, a father, a dog owner. (a bully). If fiction desires to appear realistic, characters should be shown as having an identity, no? An
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 the reader is treated to fourteen pages of gorgeous lyrical writing telling the story of how Moran got together with Rose Brady. “Rose Brady had come home from Glasgow to nurse her father and stayed on irresolutely after his death, one day stretching into another…Sometimes she had too strong of a sense of being locked into the life of the fa
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 Moran’s daughters have returned to the family home to break him out of a decline. “You’ll have to shape up, Daddy. You can’t go on like this. You’re giving us no help. We can’t get you better on our own.” Then the story moves back in time. From the present, which I believe occurs around 1960, it goes back to the last time Jimmy McQuaid came t
Alan Bray
- Oct 27, 2022
- 4 min
Amongst Women
This week, a new story, best beloved, Irishman John McGahern’s 1990 novel, Amongst Women. Great choice! Yay! Thank you. John McGahern is one of my favorite writers— Probably why you picked him. —and Amongst Women was the novel that brought him international acclaim. Short listed for the Booker Prize in 1990, it is the story of a large middle-class family in Ireland, the Morans, a family with an ageing and troubled patriarch, Michael, who was a soldier in Ireland’s Civil War i
Alan Bray
- Oct 20, 2022
- 5 min
You Are Some Kind Of Woman
On the surface, Sun would seem to be about male bonding promoted by such activities as bullfighting, fishing, and heavy drinking. Brett Ashely, a woman, is able to join in these activities because she does not behave like a conventional woman of her time (I think that’s fair to say). She cross dresses, is promiscuous, and is a heavy drinker. And she’s a card-carrying member of the lost generation. Oh, but she doesn’t fish. Actually, in a realist sense, I’m not sure she is all
Alan Bray
- Oct 13, 2022
- 5 min
That Old Green-Eyed Monster - The Sun Also Rises
Of all the male characters in The Sun Also Rises, Robert Cohn is conspicuous for having not fought in WW1, and so, is not technically a member of the “lost generation.” He is a successful writer, trained as a boxer, and Jewish, which, as mentioned, is made a big deal of in the story. Robert Cohn is mentioned straight off in the book’s opening: “Robert Cohn was once middle-weight boxing campion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title,
Alan Bray
- Oct 6, 2022
- 4 min
Iceberg Ahead! - The Sun Also Rises
Well. Last week’s post caused quite a stir. It did say that the characters in Sun are largely static, that Sun lacks the transformational characteristics of a novel, and that Hemingway seemed to portray the lost generation as lost, instead of redeemed, as he claimed he wanted to. There was the hate mail, of course, but most troubling was being followed by the burly bearded fellow with the large-bore hunting rifle who kept shouting that I was an illiterate scoundrel. Hemingway
Alan Bray
- Sep 29, 2022
- 5 min
Ahoy, Matey - The Sun Also Rises
Some critics say The Sun Also Rises is Hemingway’s best novel. The writing, the style—something we will delve into more deeply—is powerful. The prose is a joy to read. But, best beloved, is the story a novel? The definition of a novel is “a fictitious prose narrative of considerable length and complexity, portraying characters and usually presenting a sequential organization of action and scenes.” Sequential organization implies some order, and a novel’s order typically invol
Alan Bray
- Sep 22, 2022
- 4 min
The Sun Also Rises
“Kay, this week a new story, Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 novel, The Sun Also Rises. Whoa. Yes, best beloved, Hemingway’s first novel, highly acclaimed and in continuous print since its publication. Continuing the theme of exile, which we saw in much of Mavis Gallant’s work, Sun concerns a group of expatriates living in Paris. The narrator, a first-person narrator who is the central character in the story, is Jacob “Jake” Barnes, a guy who suffered a traumatic groin injury in Worl