Writers-Irish | The Gay Recluse

Archive for the ‘Writers-Irish’ Category

On Netherland

18Jan09

In which The Gay Recluse recommends a book about loss. In Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, we meet a narrator “Hans” — a Dutch expat originally from The Hague — who both at the beginning and the end of the story (this is not a spoiler, because we learn this in the first few pages) appears to”have […]

Filed under: Brooklyn, Decay, Literature, Pessimism, Ruins, Search, Writers-Irish | 1 Comment

On The Master, and Our Regret that Henry James Was Not Given His Due For Being the Hot Bear that He Was

30Jan08

There is something oddly unsatisfying about The Master, Colm Toibin’s 2004 treatment of the life of Henry James. Odd because we almost always love Toibin’s prose, which is elegant but unpretentious, and — unlike so much contemporary fiction — never shifts tenses or otherwise calls attention to itself in a distracting or superfluous manner. Occasionally […]