Children Of Silence: Studies in Contemporary Fiction

(Paperback)

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Scintillating essays on contemporary writers by one of the most original and acute of modern critics. In this absorbing series of essays Michael Wood probes and plays with the dilemmas of twentieth century fiction - the myth of lost paradise, lost certainties, the suspension between contrary ideals, the lure of fantasy, the quest for the silence beneath speech. Wood's net is cast wide, from fables to novels, and he takes due account of personal and political context and of wider cultural and critical currents, noting fiction's swerving resistance to `history'. A superb essay on Roland Barthes is juxtaposed with a dissection of Beckett's prose comedy; an investigation of three Cuban writers -Cortazar, Cabrera Infante and Arenas - is followed by illuminating essays on Milan Kundera and Italo Calvino. In the second half of the book, the exploration of time, form and fantasy, and of the break with modernism, continues in studies of Garcia Marquez, Toni Morrison, Angela Carter, Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, Paul Auster and Jeanette Winterson. Rich with pleasures, spiked with insights, provocative and satisfying, this is one of the most exciting explorations of contemporary literature in recent years.

Reviews

A triumph of imaginative reading over received opinion; I was sad to finish it -- Candia McWilliam * Independent on Sunday *
One of the very few critical books I know can be read for pure pleasure as well as enlightenment -- John Banville * Irish Times *
Wood's book is an invitation to dialogue...so full of memorable and wise formulations that one is tempted to quote and go on quoting. -- Gabriel Josopovici * T.L.S *

Author Bio

Michael Wood is the author of Stendhal, America in the Movies, Garcia Marquez- One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Magician's Doubts- Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction (also available in Pimlico). He writes film and literary criticism for the London Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review and other publications. He studied Modern Languages at St John's College, Cambridge, where he was later a Fellow. He taught for along time at Columbia University in New York and then at the University of Exeter. He is currently Professor of English at Princeton University. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.