Book Reviews

The sheer originality of “Wise Blood” is, for me, one of its strongest attractions. It is an amazing grace tale that is simply inimitable—and amazing.

In a sense, then, Melville’s most famous work (published in 1851) is made up of two different books: the one is the novel proper, which is a great and unique work of American literature; the other is a long-winded and pedantic study of whaling and whales generally.

James Joyce (1882—1941) was one of the greatest literary geniuses of the twentieth century.

Published in 1950, it concerns the titular empress and saint, who lived during the 200s and 300s A.D. and was the mother of Constantine the Great. 

In a 1974 movie called The Yakuza, it is claimed that the Japanese do not believe in a heaven or hell.

But horror more than anything else permeates Amis’s history of the Soviet Union. He gives readers a nightmarish overview of a little-known and enforced famine that ended the lives of some five million people.

Published in 1932, it is an autobiographical novel that is told in first-person by a character named Ferdinand Bardamu.  He is a doctor but talks like a criminal, and his slangy, vulgar voice is generally gripping and sometimes uproarious.  It can also be quite disturbing, as when he describes his combat experiences during World War I.

The story as a whole is consistently compelling; it is witty, thoughtful, and in the end quite moving.

Merton himself was an interesting man.  He was a twentieth century Roman Catholic monk whose writings became very popular even among nonreligious readers. 

I was a young man and about to begin four years of military service when I came across a haiku poem that struck me profoundly: