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elithefool's review against another edition
challenging
funny
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
3.75
li4_hg's review against another edition
3.5
I had to read it for school, I'M SO GLAD I'M DONE WITH IT even thought it was still a good book
trin's review against another edition
3.0
A series of essays Lodge wrote for the London Independent about, well…the art of fiction. Lodge’s tone is engaging and informative; he never talks down to the reader, and he’s not just showing off, either. My one gripe would be that the essays—having previously been newspaper columns—were all too short: I kept feeling like they ended just when he was starting to really get somewhere. But then, I was trained on lengthy English lectures. I bet Lodge was a rockin’ professor, and I wish he’d been mine.
salahreads's review against another edition
Although art is in no way an objective field, I think it is safe to say that it is not a purely subjective one either. In that respect, certain features and techniques can be gleaned from the vast world of fiction and in this book David Lodge curates some of those key features and techniques that constitute what he calls ‘The Art of Fiction’.
Sense of Place, Magic Realism and The Unreliable Narrator are just some of the 50 techniques identified and explored in this book. To demonstrate each of these techniques, the book provides an excerpt drawn from the Western literary world, modern and classic, referencing the works of Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, Kazuo Ishiguro, and George Orwell—among many others. Lodge provides commentary and elaboration on each of these techniques—explaining them and often linking them back to other chapters of the book.
Of course an art, such as fiction, can never be nailed down to an exact science. There certainly are many more aspects of fiction that do exist but went unmentioned by the book or yet remain undiscovered because literature is always evolving.
Nevertheless, this small, fun book has helped me understand ‘fiction’ much better which has only improved and enriched my reading. It is definitely a book that I wish I had read and studied at school because it has given me so much in terms of how I approach novels now and that’s coming from someone who’s in their twenties and (I’d like to think!) a seasoned reader! Personally, I have my serious gripes with the education system and how little it values reading but I’ll save that for another day.
So to conclude, whether you’re a reader of fiction or even an aspiring novelist, this is a very worthy book to have on your shelf!
shuheda's review against another edition
3.0
Some sections were interesting but others didn't reveal anything of value.
michael5000's review against another edition
5.0
This is the book that taught me how to read books. It provides a comprehensive set of critical tools for the everyday reader, and since its examples all tend to make you want to read the books they come from, it also gives you an outstanding syllabus of novels to try them out on. It was a brand-new book when I bought it; now it's dated but still rock-solid. It makes me giddy to think that I could have chosen not to buy it; I think the 25 years since would have gone a lot differently.