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Reviews for the new month

Written on: November 2nd, 2009 in Blog Posts

In this week’s New York Times Book Review Dave Eggers reviews the new volume of Kurt Vonnegut’s previously unpublished short fiction Look at the Birdie. These pieces are representative of the work Vonnegut and many other working authors of the post-War era wrote for magazines such as Saturday Evening Post– clever, witty and upbeat, but still demonstrating the emerging off-center worldview and irony that would characterize Vonnegut’s more complete and enduring work. Eggers summarizes the works in this collection as “polished..relentlessly fun to read, and every one of them comes to a neat and satisfying end.”
Turkish author Orhan Pamuk’s new work Museum of Innocence is an “enchanting novel of first love”, according to reviewer Maureen Howard, where the city of Istanbul itself is as much of a subject of the novel as the protagonist Kemal and Fusun, the object of his obsessive ardor.
The actual museum (inspired in part by the novel) in Istanbul that Pamuk recently founded and will open next year- celebrating quotidian artifacts from everyday life- was also the subject of an article in this week’s NYT magazine. Admission is free with the ticket included in the new book, and you can see a slideshow of some of the artifacts at this link.

Also reviewed this week:

• Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, the Man Booker prize winning literary reimagining of the court of Henry VIII
• The American Civil War: a Military History is a rare trip to the U.S. by British military historian John Keegan, best known for his authoritative and groundbreaking studies of the “cultural context of war and the actual experience of men in battle”.
• Ruth Rendell’s new Wexford mystery, The Monster in the Box combines a present-day investigation with an unresolved crime from the inspector’s early career.