James Wood

2 weeks ago | newyorker.com | James Wood

We know this kind of novel. Reliable as the seasons, its opening pages disclose a familiar reality. A hovering, Godlike narrator looks down upon a European border town and begins to describe it. Since the novel is long—more than four hundred and fifty pages—and its title is also the town’s name, we anticipate a small world that will prove intricately large and tangled. The prose must first uncover the immovable furniture, then introduce the immovable inhabitants.

Nov 10, 2024 | newyorker.com | James Wood

E pluribus unum might be the proper political aspiration for a large and multifarious country, but when it comes to the novel people tend to applaud something closer to the opposite.

Aug 4, 2024 | newyorker.com | James Wood

How many who piously lament the “disenchantment” of the secular world would have been able to bear ordinary life in, say, seventeenth-century Europe? We are bereft, the elegy goes, because modern knowledge has stripped us of ancient magic. We can’t wander like our ancestors in the spirit-filled woods, or hear the music of the spheres, because the sacred spaces became concrete deserts. The cathedrals were displaced by malls. To “understand” the solar system, the charge continues, is to be dead to it.

Jul 2, 2024 | tiranatimes.com | James Wood

Alas, there is nothing of quite that high order in Kadare’s most recent novel, “The Accident,” translated from the Albanian by John Hodgson (Grove; $24). The new book is spare and often powerful, but it is a bit too spare, so that the ribs of allegory show through, in painful obviousness. Many of Kadare’s familiar procedures and themes are in evidence, beginning with the positing of an enigma that needs decoding.

Mar 31, 2024 | newyorker.com | James Wood

For years I have been haunted by a sentence from V. S. Naipaul’s great tragicomic novel “A House for Mr. Biswas” (1961): “In all, Mr Biswas lived for six years at The Chase, years so squashed by their own boredom and futility that they could be comprehended in one glance.” A sentence, indeed: imagine handing down this summary verdict, and then imagine writing a novel whose every page rises up against the very summation.