Occasionally one finds succinct answers to the rather conservation [sic -- obv. we mean ‘conservative’] objections that all this POMO is just self-indulgent game=playing with language, (etc). And, yes, we can blame DFW for earning this lazy accusation so much cred. I really don't want to rehear...
To paraphrase one fondl(e)y viewed meviewer, Josipovici flirts with postmodernism, Adair is a proud proponent. Frankly, the division is artificial, but since both state firmly their respective camps (no pun intended), resistance is useless.While Only Joking appeared in 2010, a playful twist on th...
A wonderful novel, written with the kind of self-conscious brio that I adore. Transposing (‘transtemporising’, I suppose) the action of Cocteau's Les Enfants terribles to a more revolutionary 1968 – when Adair himself had been in Paris – it re-examines the same themes of juvenile sexuality and de...
Love and Death on Long Island by Gilbert Adair centres on the development of an obsession that in many respects greatly resembles Death in Venice (which I only read for the first time earlier this year). There’s no doubt that the allusions to Thomas Mann’s classic text are quite deliberate.Like D...