Search Results

“... a swollen effigy, many times its normal size. Abnormal normality is the operating principle of Emma Donoghue’s novel Room, which is a kind of prison-lit lite. Based on the Josef Fritzl case, it is narrated by Jack, a five-year-old American, whose mother was abducted at the age of 19 and imprisoned in a single room measuring 121 square feet. She is ...”

“... a political novel about the Troubles than a prolonged meditation on the psychology of violence. Emma Donoghue’s Stir-fry appears to offer a portrait of incipient lesbianism confronted by a repressive morality, but in the end its intentions turn out to be much airier than that. Joseph O’Connor’s novel is the most wide-ranging and the most fun to ...”

“... and Nathan Englander as ‘quite simply, one of the very best we have’. He has called Emma Donoghue ‘one of the great literary ventriloquists’ and John Boyne ‘one of the great craftsmen in contemporary literature’. Gerard Donovan reminds him of ‘other great writers, not least Knut Hamsun, Franz Kafka and … Bernhard ...”

“... coding of Sappho as Sapphist has a complex 17th and 18th-century genealogy as well, as the work of Emma Donoghue and others has shown.) Yet none of this history carries any ultimate weight in Victorian Sappho. All representations of Sappho are equally false – mere figments or ‘translation effects’, written over poor old Sappho’s dead body. Even if ...”