My Book Reviews

The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman by Bruce Robinson (b. 1946). Isn't the cover of this book amazing?  It cast its spell on me such that I just had to pick it up. This book is a marvellous read and covers such diverse issues as growing up; coming of age; the relationship between a young boy, Thomas and his grandfather, Walter; life and death and dying; sex and hate; dog’s meat, excrement; pornography, enemas, that is, everything about digestion and excretion; Morse Code; puberty; secrets; God and Religion and much more.  Mostly, it deals with love. Basically, this novel describes a dysfunctional family in 1950s England. Patrick Kavanagh says somewhere that life is more tragi-comedy than it is either tragedy or comedy. There is much tragedy in this book, but it is shot through from beginning to end with masterful comedy. One runs the whole gamut of emotions reading it — one cries and laughs by turns. This is also a distu...

The Catcher in the Rye A Novel on Adolescence The Catcher in the Rye The Catcher in the Rye is a novel by the reclusive and highly eccentric American novelist J.D. Salinger. This novel was published in the USA in 1951. It was voted by Time magazine in 2005 as one of the top 100 novels written in English since 1923. J.D. Salinger was born in Manhattan, New York in 1919 and died in 2010.  He was a recluse and gave very few interviews in his life, the last interview took place in 1980.  If one reads anything about J.D. Salinger — what little there is to read about — one will find him a highly eccentric individual and probably as tormented and angst-ridden as his partially autobiographical hero Holden Caulfield. The minute I started to read this novel, I was captivated by the narrator’s voice which essentially means that the style is conversational and direct and is that of a friendly confused adolescent.  The first line grabs attention: “Don't ever tell anybody anyt...

Letters from the Soul : Review of Don’t You Have Time to Think? by Richard P. Feynman (London: Penguin, 2006) Letter writing is a dying art since the advent of mobile phones, texting and indeed email. Ease of access to another human is now instantaneous. However, I would question in how far real communication has improved using these modern methods. Sitting down to physically write a letter was/is an art and a craft in itself – indeed a hugely symbolic act or ritual. Indeed, a love letter was, and still is, for those who write them and for those who receive them, an action of the heart or of the soul, both of which terms I use interchangeably here. These thoughts were occasioned by reading of Richard P. Feynman’s collection of letters which cover the greater part of his 70 years of life (1918-1988). This book is called Don’t You Have Time to Think? It is edited by his adopted daughter Michelle and published by Penguin Books, 2006. It was, quite obviously, a labour of l...

Henderson The Rain King One of our English lecturers at college was Rev. Michael Paul Gallagher S.J., still hale and hearty and living in Rome where he retired as Professor of Fundamental Theology. His webpage can be visited HERE . Anyway, one of the great novels that Michael Paul introduced us to was Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King   (1959)   which we read and studied in 1978.  This is a brilliant novel and it deals with that perennial theme in human life, namely the search for meaning.  I was enthralled by   Henderson   and his quest.  In the novel   Henderson   is a middle-aged, 55 year old to be precise, menopausal male looking for some meaning in his "meaningless" and boring life.  Indeed the hero, or anti-hero, of this novel is a send-up or burlesque or parody of the more seriously depicted heroes of the modernist novel - the likes of Stephen Dedalus in our own James Joyce's marvellous wee book   The Portra...

Reviews of Two Books on Auschwitz 1. Survival in Auschwitz: If This Is a Man I read  Survival in Auschwitz: If This Is a Man  (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996) by the Italian Jew, Primo Levi, almost ten years ago and have re-read it for this review.  I have always liked Levi’s books – especially his succinct, objective, dispassionate style.  I marvelled and still marvel at how dispassionate his voice is as he recounts how he was taken away to the concentration camp.  Take these two sentences that I find very moving:  “There are few men who know how to go to their deaths with dignity, and often they are not those whom one would expect.  Few know how to remain silent and respect the silence of others.” (p. 18) Then when the prisoners had been “processed” i.e., sorted into those fit for work and those suitable only to be exterminated immediately, stripped naked, shorn like sheep of every hair on their bodies, given...