Metaliterature

Search This Blog

The Relationship Cure by John M Gottman and Joan DeClaire

October 12, 2025

Get link
Facebook
X
Pinterest
Email
Other Apps

Awaiting review...

(Paid link)

Get link
Facebook
X
Pinterest
Email
Other Apps

Comments

Readers Are Reading

A Bright Moon For Fools by Jasper Gibson

Dipsomaniacal - an apt description of most Christmas's round mine... Ah, what would be a review penned by yours truly without some sort of grovelling apology at the outset? A better review no doubt, but that aside I can't help but continue the tiresome tradition with an apology. Sorry to my regular robotic readers (hi bots!) but I have been very neglectful of the blog of late, having been tied up with my pursuit of a broader spectrum of dilettantism; I've been taking part in a number of MOOCs offered by various HEIs on the FutureLearn platform. Worth checking out if you ask me. (Subtle enough plug, you think?) Anyway, the break afforded by a foray into further education has proved something of a test for Jasper Gibson and his fiction. In truth, it took me a little while to remember what exactly the novel was about, who was in it, and how I felt about the whole thing. Instant alarm bells. Of course, having had a break, I'd had a good crack at filling my h...

Our Ancestors by Italo Calvino

The dog signifies nothing... Now is as good a time as any I suppose to admit that I regularly confuse Italo Calvino with Umberto Eco and when struggling for the name of one of them, invariably come up with the name of the other. What value does this add to a review of either’s work? None whatsoever. I just thought it would pay to be honest up front, so that if I start talking about semiotics, the discourse of literary criticism, or beards, then you’ll know my train of thoughts has switched tracks and is heading for a bridge under construction. Of course, reading the Wiki pages on the two of them (to make sure I was talking about the right fellow) I noticed with some dread that Our Ancestors is one of the best known works of the most translated contemporary Italian writer (at the time of his death) and here I am, trying to make sense of it in my own personal context. Well, I’m always going to be treading down some fool’s heels so why should I care if it’s actually most peopl...

Horse Destroys The Universe by Cyriak Harris

I think our horse might be eating the internet. So, I hear you ask, what the utter fuck? To be honest, I pledged to the crowd-funding of this book purely on the premise that a horse could destroy the universe, which essentially, and spoiler-free (it’s in the chuffing title after all) it does. After that, this entire review is based on the research I did this morning between sitting at my desk and actually starting the work I’m paid to do (around 60-80 minutes all told). First off, Morgan Cyriak Harris is an animator who enjoys the surreal effects of the formal Western Art Tradition technique of mis en abyme , or in other words, the deliberate placing within an image of a copy of the same image and the subsequent implication of infinitely represented worlds – think two mirrors reflecting each other. In literary terms this could be the self-reflexive embedding of the story within the story, something of which I am inordinately fond. In Harris’s work this te...

Breakfast Of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut

To be the eyes and ears and conscience of the Creator of the Universe, you fool. In days gone by, when repeatedly pressed about what my favourite book might be, a banal question seeking an impossible and crude reductionist answer to which I was usually rude in response, I would offer Breakfast Of Champions as a pacifier. I first read it in University, and it has, to some degree, influenced how I think and feel about a lot of things. Strikingly, I've never wanted to re-read it. Perhaps I was afraid I'd find fault the second time around and wanted to uphold it as a paragon of meta-fiction. Perhaps, but then I'm a relentless consumer of fiction and was always on to the next consumable work, never having time or inclination to go back. So in the spirit of a more considered and thoughtful phase of my life I decided I wa nted to read something that once made me feel good. I'd clearly not remembered it very well. But before that, I'm amazed I've gone *mum...

The Heat's On by Chester Himes

It was laughter dripping wet with tears. Coloured people's laughter. It’s not something on which I’ve dwelled for any great length of time, conventionally or historically – although it is now creeping around the page edges of the fictionalised autobiography in the shop window of my thoughts thanks to books like Glyph by Percival Everett amongst others – but I am guilty of what Siang Lu calls , “ontological whiteness - where you default a character, if not otherwise specified, as white.” In all honesty, guilt probably isn’t the correct response as it would imply that there is a right and wrong way to imagine the characters in a novel, when matters of culture and nurture and considered, and assuming people are WASPs (like me) is devilment, although bias is perhaps an imbalance at best. I refer you to the chapter in Glyph where baby Ralph states for the first time to the reader that he isn’t white, despite what the reader might assume (leading in my case at least to a notably reverse...

Powered by Blogger

The Relationship Cure by John M Gottman and Joan DeClaire

Comments

Post a Comment