James Wood

“There may be many readers who, on hearing of J.M. Coetzee’s Nobel prize, immediately thought about the cost of clarity. There is so much, after all, missing from Coetzee’s distinguished books. His prose is precise, but blanched; in place of comedy there is only bitter irony . . . in place of society, with its domestic and familial affiliations, there is political society; and underfoot is often the tricky camber of allegory, insisting on pulling one’s step in certain directions.”

Rummaging around, in a notebook entry of 1896, for the properly grim place to deposit his unfortunate heroine, Maisie Farange, Henry James alights on Folkestone, and with grey satisfaction asks himself: ‘don’t I get an effect from Folkestone?’ James does indeed get an ‘effect’, in What Maisie Knew, from Folkestone: from the name, from the town, from its seaside...

It is in some ways unfortunate that Tchaikovsky set Eugene Onegin to music, not Rossini, the composer of deep shallows. Pushkin, according to T.J. Binyon’s remarkable biography, became ‘addicted’ to Rossini while living in Odessa, where an Italian opera company was visiting, and though Binyon makes nothing of it, it rather blares at us, as writers’ tastes in music so...

The writing manages its vividness not by flouncing into Fine Writing but by combining a literary register with Pi’s simpler, earnest voice (’it was positively deafening’). Still, although Pi certainly has a voice, the literary cost of his boyish naivety is that he is somewhat empty as a character.