Tag: postmodernism
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Vis-à-vis dystopia in Paul Lynch’s ‘Prophet Song’
Paul Lynch’s “Prophet Song,” a dystopian novel set in Ireland, captures our era’s social and political unease, earning the 2023 Booker Prize. It explores totalitarianism’s personal impact through characters’ declining capacity to read faces, invoking philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of the face-to-face encounter. The narrative warns against the corruptive power of authoritarian regimes.
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The forest of discovery in Jon Fosse’s ‘A Shining’
The 2023 Nobel laureate Jon Fosse inverts Plato’s Allegory of the Cave in his book ‘A Shining’, portraying a journey of confusion and ghostly visions within a dark forest. Unlike Plato’s enlightenment through external light, Fosse suggests a discovery of truth within darkness, paralleling certainty with confusion and using the forest as a metaphorical space…
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Exhaustion and exhaustive: Colum McCann’s ‘Apeirogon’
Colum McCann’s Apeirogon (Bloomsbury, 2020) is a novel. I know this because it tells me both on the cover of the hardback edition, and in the acknowledgements. In the latter, McCann explains that this is a hybrid novel with invention at its core, a work of storytelling which, like all storytelling, weaves together elements of…
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(Post-)postmodernist elegy: Stephen Sexton’s ‘If All the World and Love Were Young’
Stephen Sexton’s If All The World and Love Were Young (Penguin, 2019) has proven phenomenally successful, having won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and being shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize. And yet, it is not an easy poetry collection, proving both difficult in terms of its style and allusive references, and…
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Not quite everything: ‘Fatherhood’ by Caleb Klaces
The question of form may never be resolved. Is the novel better than poetry? Are short stories just novel-lite? In Fatherhood (Prototype, 2019), Caleb Klaces avoids that scrutiny completely by mixing two of those forms together. Fatherhood combines ‘prose and poetry in an experimental work of verse fiction’. The text tells the story of Caleb…