Book reviews roundup: Jacobson’s savage satire; McInerney’s miracles; memories of Sacks

What the critics thought of Howard Jacobson’s Pussy, Lisa McInerney’s The Blood Miracles and Bill Hayes’s Insomniac CityTwo eagerly anticipated and very different novels divided critics this month. Howard Jacobson’s Pussy was written in two months in “a fury of disbelief” after Donald Trump’s US election victory, and is set in a fictionalised world in which spoiled Prince Fracassus rules. “Flawed but fascinating” wrote Anita Sethi in the i, summing up many critics’ feelings. “At its best, the book brilliantly portrays a world in which language and the complexity of ideas that it can convey have been devalued … ” The Observer’s Andrew Anthony also accentuated the positives, finding “many aesthetic pleasures to be had in Pussy. If Trump’s presidency is a source of continuing anxiety, then among its very few benefits is that it is has moved one of our finest comic writers to write an elegantly savage satire of a man who defies satire.” But this satirising of the unsatirisable vexed some. “The more you share its premises, the more you wish this satire had sharper edge. Fracassus’s unsavoury grotesqueness never trumps Trump’s,” wrote Peter Kemp in the Sunday Times, while the Independent’s Lucy Scholes felt “inclined to wonder what [Jacobson’s] hurry was. From a novelist of his pedigree ... I wanted something more considered.”Lisa McInerney’s The Blood Miracles is the follow-up to her Baileys women’s fiction prize-winning debut The Glorious Heresies and focuses on that novel’s... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'

[ The Guardian | 2017-04-21 00:00:00 UTC ]

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