Book description
In this absorbing series of essays Michael Wood probes and plays with
the dilemmas of twentieth century fiction - the myth of lost paradise,
lost certainties, the suspension between contrary ideals, the lure of
fantasy, the quest for the silence beneath speech. Wood's net is cast
wide, from fables to novels, and he takes due account of personal and
political context and of wider cultural and critical currents, noting
fiction's swerving resistance to `history'. A superb essay on Roland
Barthes is juxtaposed with a dissection of Beckett's prose comedy; an
investigation of three Cuban writers -Cortazar, Cabrera Infante and
Arenas - is followed by illuminating essays on Milan Kundera and Italo
Calvino. In the second half of the book, the exploration of time, form
and fantasy, and of the break with modernism, continues in studies of
Garcia Marquez, Toni Morrison, Angela Carter, Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman
Rushdie, Paul Auster and Jeanette Winterson. Rich with pleasures, spiked
with insights, provocative and satisfying, this is one of the most
exciting explorations of contemporary literature in recent years.
Michael Wood is the author of
Stendhal
, America in the Movies
, Garcia Marquez
: One Hundred Years of Solitude
and The Magician's Doubts
: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction
(also available in Pimlico). He writes film and literary criticism for
the London Review of Books
, the New York Times Book Review
and other publications. He studied Modern Languages at St John's
College, Cambridge, where he was later a Fellow. He taught for along
time at Columbia University in New York and then at the University of
Exeter. He is currently Professor of English at Princeton University. He
is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
