obscuredbyclouds's review against another edition
3.0
This book lay next to my bed for over a year, half-way read through. It confused me greatly, and a lot of things went over my head. I got the feeling James Wood really had no problem losing me right away. When he talks about novels and tells you what he think is happening there, structurally or stylistically, he expects you to have read them and know the characters names by heart. Which meant whenever he talked about authors I've read - Sartre, Mann, Austen, Roth, Foster Wallace, etc - I could follow and found some of the things he said enlightening. And whenever he talked of authors I hadn't read - Flaubert & most of the Russians - I felt instantly lost.
This is highly pretentious both in its wording and the structure (over 100 short, numbered paragraphs), as well as in how sure James Wood is of himself and is assertions. Still, there were interesting notes and the book did get me wondering about the pros and cons of realism and realistic style. Also, it made me want to read some of the books he talked about that I haven't read yet. His enthusiasm for them was really tangible.
This is not so much a book for writers (or not meant to be), as it is a book for seasoned readers.
We have to read musically, testing the precision and rhythm of a sentence, listening for the almost inaudible rustle of historical association clinging to the hems of modern words, attending to patterns, repetitions, echoes, deciding why one metaphor is successful and another is not, judging how the perfect placement of the right verb or adjective seals a sentence with mathematical finality.
This is highly pretentious both in its wording and the structure (over 100 short, numbered paragraphs), as well as in how sure James Wood is of himself and is assertions. Still, there were interesting notes and the book did get me wondering about the pros and cons of realism and realistic style. Also, it made me want to read some of the books he talked about that I haven't read yet. His enthusiasm for them was really tangible.
This is not so much a book for writers (or not meant to be), as it is a book for seasoned readers.
We have to read musically, testing the precision and rhythm of a sentence, listening for the almost inaudible rustle of historical association clinging to the hems of modern words, attending to patterns, repetitions, echoes, deciding why one metaphor is successful and another is not, judging how the perfect placement of the right verb or adjective seals a sentence with mathematical finality.
gemmabenglish's review against another edition
5.0
it is a critics book more than a craft book but it’s also a love letter and i love a love letter
halibut's review against another edition
4.0
It's been a long while since I read any literary critcism, and this book was casual enough in tone to be an easy reintroduction. The introduction to the 2018 edition spends some time defending against accusations that it is just a defense of realism, but a large amount of the book is dedicated to analysis of realism and it's shifting forms. Some of the more technical points, like a definition of free indirect style and the function of detail I found really useful, and the rest I found at least interesting. There were points where more arch postmodernists like Barth are dismissed almost as shallowly comic and I think their work does get short shrift here, but it would be strange to read a book of criticism and agree with every point. It's left me with a list of books I now want to read though!
corneliadolian's review against another edition
3.0
This book started out strong and promising, and I thought it was going to cover the elements of the novel in its many incarnations. However, it presented a very narrow view of the novel (and fiction in general) and rarely used any examples of texts written in the last 50 years. For instance, when it discussed point of view, it only really discussed the third person. I was hoping for more. I was hoping for broader examples, more allowance for different styles and ways of constructing a novel.
I think I would've found this book more helpful and interesting had I been an avid reader of D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Flaubert and Dostoyevsky. Because I do not regularly read any of those authors (and yes, I guess that's my fault/a disadvantage of my own making), I didn't get as much from the examples as I could have, and eventually found them tedious and dull.
I think I would've found this book more helpful and interesting had I been an avid reader of D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Flaubert and Dostoyevsky. Because I do not regularly read any of those authors (and yes, I guess that's my fault/a disadvantage of my own making), I didn't get as much from the examples as I could have, and eventually found them tedious and dull.
callyourselfareader's review against another edition
informative
inspiring
lighthearted
relaxing
4.0
An excellent journey through the art of creating fiction with examples from a range of texts and authors.