Having become excited about Henry James by Alan Hollinghurst's infectious enthusiasm for James in The Line of Beauty , I for some reason decided, instead of reading Henry James, to read ColmToíbín 's
The Master , a biography of Henry James in novel form.The Master , finding James the man less than his work.Toíbín , whose achievement in The Master cannot credibly be criticized for not being one by Henry James.Portrait of a Lady hadn't been so long and, I can't help thinking, contrived . . . .
TrackBack URL: http://www.mayaalexandri.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/93
Select category
Authors (173)
--Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi (1)
--Auel, Jean M. (1)
--Austen, Jane (6)
--Auster, Paul (1)
--Bauman, Beth Ann (1)
--Beckett, Samuel (2)
--Blixen, Karen (22)
--Blum, Jenna (2)
--Bolaño, Roberto (7)
--Borges, Jorge Luis (8)
--Bull, Bartle (2)
--Byatt, A.S. (1)
--Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1)
--Cornwell, Bernard (1)
--Coward, Noel (1)
--Cranworth, Lord (1)
--Dehaene, Stanislas (1)
--Desai, Santosh (1)
--Descartes, René (2)
--Diamond, Jared (1)
--Didion, Joan (2)
--Dobyns, Stephen (1)
--Doctorow, E.L. (1)
--Eliot, George (4)
--Enright, Anne (1)
--Flaubert, Gustave (4)
--Forester, C.S. (4)
--Forster, E.M. (7)
--Fox, James (1)
--Frayn, Michael (2)
--Gaarder, Jostein (2)
--Garcia Marquez, Gabriel (3)
--Gibbons, Stella (2)
--Gilbert, Elizabeth (1)
--Gordon, George, Lord Byron (5)
--Gottlieb, Lori (1)
--Grossman, David (3)
--Hanley, Gerald (3)
--Hare, David (1)
--Hitchens, Christopher (1)
--Hochschild, Adam (1)
--Hollinghurst, Alan (5)
--Huxley, Aldous (1)
--Huxley, Elspeth (5)
--Irving, John (1)
--Ishiguro, Kazuo (1)
--James, Henry (13)
--Jamie, Kathleen (1)
--Johnson, Samuel (1)
--Kassobova, Kapka (1)
--Kundera, Milan (1)
--Leakey, Lewis (1)
--Leithauser, Brad (1)
--Mantel, Hilary (6)
--Markham, Beryl (2)
--Maugham, Somerset (2)
--Maupassant, Guy de (2)
--McEwan, Ian (3)
--Middleton, Thomas (1)
--Miller, Arthur (1)
--Miller, Charles (2)
--Mitchell, David (1)
--Mitchell, Margaret (3)
--Moore, Lorrie (6)
--Naipaul, V.S. (1)
--Oliver, Mary (1)
--Ong, Walter (8)
--Oyono, Ferdinand (2)
--Patterson, James (1)
--Peck, Dale (1)
--Pierpont, Claudia Roth (1)
--Powers, Richard (1)
--Proust, Marcel (1)
--Rankin, Ian (1)
--Robinson, Marilynne (1)
--Rosberg, Jr., Carl G. and Nottingham, John (2)
--Ryan, Kay (2)
--Sacks, Oliver (1)
--Salih, Tayeb (3)
--Salinger, J.D. (2)
--Shakespeare, William (7)
--Shaw, George Bernard (1)
--Singer, Peter (1)
--Stein, Gertrude (1)
--Sterne, Laurence (1)
--Thackeray, William (3)
--Thomas, DM (1)
--Thurman, Judith (1)
--Toíbín, Colm (6)
--Tree, Iris (1)
--Trzebinski, Errol (5)
--Turgenev, Ivan (1)
--Vargas Llosa, Mario (11)
--Wainaina, Binyavanga (1)
--Wallace, David Foster (2)
--Waugh, Evelyn (1)
--Wheeler, Sara (2)
--Whitman, Walt (1)
--Winterson, Jeanette (1)
--Wodehouse, P.G. (9)
--Wolf, Maryanne (2)
--Wordsworth, William (1)
--Wrong, Michela (1)
--Yagoda, Ben (1)
--de Saint-Exupéry, Antoine (1)
--de Tocqueville, Alexis (1)
--wa Thiongo, Ngugi (3)
Biographies (7)
--Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller (1)
--Silence Will Speak (5)
--Too Close to the Sun (3)
Book Reviews (47)
Copyright (6)
Exhibition catalogs (2)
--and Europe will be stunned (2)
Fables (5)
--The Little Prince (1)
--Winter's Tales (4)
Humanitarian work (11)
Life (28)
Maya Alexandri's Novels (5)
--The Celebration Husband (1)
--The Swing of Beijing (5)
Memoir (14)
--Kenya Chronicles (1)
--Out of Africa (8)
--Shadows on the Grass (3)
--Warriors (3)
--West with the Night (2)
Non-fiction (22)
--Democracy in America (1)
--Discourse on Method (1)
--Forks and Hope: An African Notebook (4)
--Guns, Germs and Steel (1)
--Kenya: Contrasts and Problems (1)
--Letters from Africa (3)
--Memoir: A History (1)
--Mother Pious Lady (1)
--Orality & Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (7)
--Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting the World (1)
--Proust and the Squid (2)
--Reading in the Brain (1)
--The Lunatic Express (2)
--The Myth of "Mau Mau": Nationalism in Kenya (2)
--White Mischief (1)
Notes to Self (4)
Novels (93)
--2666 (7)
--A Book of Common Prayer (2)
--A Gate at the Stairs (3)
--A Grain of Wheat (2)
--A House for Mr. Biswas (1)
--A Passage to India (2)
--A Place of Greater Safety (3)
--A Room with a View (5)
--Black Swan Green (1)
--Cold Comfort Farm (2)
--Daisy Miller (3)
--Emma (1)
--Fathers and Sons (1)
--Gilead (1)
--Gone with the Wind (2)
--Half of a Yellow Sun (1)
--Houseboy (2)
--In Praise of the Stepmother (2)
--Invisible (1)
--Love in the Time of Cholera (2)
--Madame Bovary (3)
--Middlemarch (4)
--Northanger Abbey (2)
--Portraint of a Lady (1)
--Possession (1)
--Pride and Prejudice (1)
--Psmith, Journalist (1)
--Red Strangers (1)
--Right Ho, Jeeves (1)
--Season of Migration to the North (2)
--Sense and Sensibility (1)
--Sophie's World (2)
--Thank You, Jeeves (1)
--The African Queen (4)
--The Aspern Papers (2)
--The Bad Girl (3)
--The Catcher in the Rye (2)
--The Child in Time (3)
--The Clan of the Cavebear (1)
--The Fallen Angel (1)
--The Feast of the Goat (2)
--The Fountainhead (1)
--The Line of Beauty (4)
--The Master (5)
--The Moon and Sixpence (2)
--The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (2)
--The Turn of the Screw (4)
--The Valley of the Horses (1)
--The White Rhino Hotel (2)
--The Wings of the Dove (1)
--The World According to Garp (1)
--This Way to Paradise (3)
--Those Who Save Us (1)
--To the End of the Land (3)
--Vanity Fair (3)
--Weight (1)
--Wolf Hall (3)
On Being Female (22)
Plays (14)
--A Midsummer's Night Dream (1)
--All My Sons (1)
--Beppo (1)
--Copenhagen (2)
--Design for Living (1)
--Hamlet (2)
--Henry IV, parts 1 and 2 (1)
--Krapp's Last Tape (1)
--Lysistrata (1)
--Othello (1)
--Pygmalion (1)
--Wall: A Monologue (2)
--Women Beware Women (1)
Podcasts (1)
Poems (12)
--Dear Doctor, I Have Read Your Play (2)
--Lines Written in Early Spring (1)
--Sonnet XVII (1)
--Sonnet XX (1)
--Spiderweb (1)
--The Door (1)
--The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1)
--The way we live (1)
--Turtle (2)
--Where We Are (after Bede) (1)
--Who Kill'd John Keats? (1)
--Wild Geese (1)
Publishing (14)
Research for Novels (31)
Short stories (14)
--Averröes' Search (1)
--Boule de suif (1)
--Emma Zunz (1)
--House of Asterion (1)
--Ibn-Hakam al-Bokhari, Murdered in His Labyrinth (1)
--Parable of the Palace (1)
--Ragnarök (1)
--Romance at Droitgate Spa (1)
--Self-Help (3)
--Story of the Warrior and the Captive Maiden (1)
--The Dead Man (2)
--The Heroine (1)
--The Immortal (2)
--The Man on the Threshold (1)
--The Necklace (1)
--The Theologians (1)
--The Two Kings and their Two Labyrinths (1)
--The Witness (1)
--The Writing of the God (1)
--The Zahir (1)
The Bible (2)
The Great Themes (120)
--Art and transcendence (6)
--Articulating the inarticulable (6)
--Connection between literacy and visual arts (4)
--Critical thinking (9)
--Family patterns across generations (3)
--Fidelity to facts (9)
--Human consciousness (3)
--Humiliation and love (3)
--Importance of aesthetics (1)
--Integrity under fire (3)
--Limitations on compassion (12)
--Prudishness (4)
--Reading and class distinctions (2)
--The inessentialness of humanity (2)
--The nature of fiction (10)
--The nature of greatness (8)
--The perils of insularity (14)
--The power of writing (11)
--The role of the novelist (13)
--The value of debate (4)
--The value of reading (15)
--The well-told story (34)
--Transitional modernization (8)
--Unconditional love of life (4)
Video (4)
Writing my novels (16)
Leave a comment