Criticism Archives - Page 18 of 30 - Home For Fiction

Criticism

Review of Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami

September 20, 2019

book, fiction, Gothic, Japan, literary fiction, literature, Murakami, review

As I might have mentioned before, I am a fan of Japanese literature. I’m really drawn to the minimalist, abstract, sometimes absurd and sometimes mundane style of many Japanese authors. Haruki Murakami is such an author, but when I began reading his Killing Commendatore I would never expect that a review of Killing Commendatore would include the tag “Gothic”.

As a typical Murakami book, it’s not quite simple to put it into a prefabricated shape. It’s many things, and yet it isn’t. It has a beginning and an ending, and yet it doesn’t. It’s one of those novels that you’ll either love or hate. The good news is, fans of Haruki Murakami will most definitely love it.

Review of Killing Commendatore — The (Gothic) conflict between natural and unnatural, real and unreal, becomes literally true in *Killing Commendatore*

(more…)

Religion in Frankenstein: Dialectics of Authority

August 30, 2019

Criticism

academia, criticism, frankenstein, Gothic, religion

Note: the following article on religion in Frankenstein is a modified excerpt (pp. 110-111) from my doctoral dissertation, “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic, which is available for free from the repository of the Tampere University Press. For a list of my other academic publications, presentations, etc. feel free to visit the relevant page on the main Home for Fiction website.

You can also find an article about religion in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and another about religion on Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Religion in Frankenstein: A Secular or Religious World?

In the context of Frankenstein, a story replete with moral dilemmas and dichotomies based on otherness, it is perhaps not surprising to discover a multitude of religiously charged temporal dichotomies.

Punter and Byron argue that Victor, although a modern Prometheus (as the subtitle of the novel underlines), lives in “a notably secular world with no gods against whom to rebel, and … his search is conceived of in scientific terms” (2004, 199).

religion in Frankenstein — Religion in *Frankenstein* is a matter of understanding the dialectics of authority involved in the story

(more…)

Review of Rachel Cusk’s Outline

July 21, 2019

Book Review, Criticism

book, fiction, Greece, literary fiction, literature, Rachel Cusk, review

This post features another book review, and yet it’s so much more than a review. Writing this review of Rachel Cusk’s Outline is a fantastic opportunity for me to talk about literary fiction. What it should be and what it doesn’t care about.

Often on this blog I talk about over-explaining in fiction, or about realistic characters versus insignificant plots. Rachel Cusk’s Outline is one of the best examples of what high-quality (literary) fiction ought to be.

Outline is not perfect (we’ll talk about its flaws in a while), but as an example it’s near-flawless. In other words, it’s great teaching material.

(more…)