Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

John Fowles (1)

The Ebony Tower by John Fowles

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“David arrived at Coëtminais the afternoon after the one he had landed at Cherbourg and driven down to Avranches, where he had spent the intervening Tuesday night. ” This is a collection of stories and one novella. It’s actually a novella, three stories, and a translation of one of the lays of Marie de France, but with a sizeable translator’s note that kind of functions a little like a story intro. Regardless, one of the things that emerges from that intro, which is the second […]

Why do you take all the life out of life? Why do you kill all the beauty?

The Collector by John Fowles

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CBR Bingo: Minds I remember GP saying that collectors are the worst animals of all. He meant art collectors, of course. I didn’t really understand, I thought he was just trying to shock Caroline—and me. But of course, he is right. They are anti-life, anti-art, anti-everything. I have had John Fowles’ The Collector in my library for a number of years. I recently read that it was one of the first modern psychological thrillers, so it seemed like a good match for the “Minds” category. […]

The Magus

The Magus by John Fowles

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Every once in a while a novel will come out and it will be lauded as the takedown of the a certain kind of man — a literary author, a wayward dude, a divorced dad, the fuck boy. And while sometimes the novels are good, they never quite feel the takedown people want them to be, and as if often the case, they weren’t ever really supposed to be a takedown at all. In fact, I would say of course that literature, as it’s always […]

It was conscious of luminous and infinite haze, as it were floating, godlike, alpha, omega, over a sea of vapor and looking down.

Mantissa by John Fowles

Death, Sleep and the Traveller by John Hawkes

Too Late by Stephen Dixon

Molloy by Samuel Beckett

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To me, if you call someone post-modern as a writer I have two competing notions of this — minimalism, which generally excepts the limitations of representation and instead looks at cross-sections, slices, intersections, and impasse in stories and human relationship and language. I think of the plays of Beckett or various Don Delillo novels. The other thing I think about with postmodernism is maximalism, an attempt to tell everything about a thing and then often failing as well because whether we attempt to shown them […]

We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

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The French Lieutenant’s Woman follows Charles as he first meets Sarah by the ocean in an English seaside town. He is walking with his fiance, Ernestina, but is immediately drawn to the black, forlorn figure standing with her back to the shore. When he later chances upon her again he cannot deny that he is fascinated, and not just by her mysterious, tragic past, but also because he totally wants to bang her. “There are some men who are consoled by the idea that there […]

You do not even think of your own past as quite real; you dress it up, you gild it or blacken it, censor it, tinker with it…fictionalize it, in a word, and put it away on a shelf – your book, your romanced autobiography.

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CBR10Bingo – Backlog This will also briefly discuss the film version, which I also watched, but focuses on the novel. I chose this book for the Backlog section because I’ve had copies of several John Fowles novels on my shelves for years, and except for an aborted attempt at his novel A Maggot, I’ve never read one. I became aware of Fowles through a British professor who taught Modernism and also mentioned his Contemporary literature class which included this novel. I read several of the […]



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