Book Reviews

Articles in this section

• "Disgrace", by J.M. Coetzee

  15 December 2004 by Ray

  A 52-year-old professor of literature gets into big trouble by having intimate relations with one of his female students. So he abandons his university life in Cape Town to settle in for a while with his ex-hippy daughter on a tiny homestead in the wilds of Eastern Cape province, where he helps (...)

• "Runaway", by Alice Munro

  11 December 2004 by Ray

  This is the latest collection of short stories by Alice Munro, one of Canada’s foremost writers. It was published in the fall of 2004, when it received exceptionally warm reviews from the main Canadian papers, or at least the ones I read during my visit there at the time (The Globe and Mail and (...)

• "Fiesta (The Sun Also Rises)", by Ernest Hemingway

  2 December 2004 by Ray

  This was Hemingway’s first major novel, published in 1927, better known under its later title The Sun Also Rises. It’s set essentially in the Paris of 1924 and in Pamplona, Spain, during the 7-day bullfight fiesta there. The narrator is an American journalist-writer based in Paris (like (...)

• "The Blind Assassin", by Margaret Atwood

  29 November 2004 by Ray

  This was a rather disappointing book for the Atwood fan which I am, as I had been quite offput by an earlier (1985) Atwood book - The Handmaid’s Tale - which I had just finished reading, and I was hoping that this much more recent (2000) work would restore for me the image I have had of her for (...)