I sometimes think of myself as a smart man. But I’m not a smart man. I’m just interested in a lot of things, so I have a tendency to look into a lot of things. That gives me a broad but fairly shallow knowledge base upon which I can build my reality. Since I go wherever my interests direct me, I can’t always predict where I’ll be, or what I’ll experience. When I try and set a course, I find that I start to drift […]

This is one of those novels that is in my head as just perfect or near-perfect in execution. That list also includes The Great Gatsby and The Metamorphosis and Heart of Darkness. It may or may have much to say about enjoyment or heights of reading or anything like that but about precision of form and content, and especially economy of language. I define literature in fiction as telling a story in the only possible way. So in this book, and this is a reread for the first […]