Robert Earle's Blog
RSS
May.20.2013
Even though by now we know most what Neil Barofsky packs into his book, Bailout: How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street, it remains worth reading as an in-depth, consolidated account of how the Bush and Obama administrations pretended to be supporting overwhelmed...
Continue Reading »
May.17.2013
Our Kind of Traitor by John le Carré is a novel about a Russian money-launderer (Dima) who seeks the help of a friendly British couple (Perry and Gail) when they meet on the island of Antigua. Dima's need: to reach British intelligence and defect, not from the USSR, but from the...
Continue Reading »
May.12.2013
Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami is a congenial, amusing, yet slow-moving novel that demonstrates the fundamental truth about fiction and storytelling in general: there are no rules. This novel could be called “magical realism” in that things occur that we know can’t occur and haven’t...
Continue Reading »
May.03.2013
Strangers, by Anita Brookner, had the peculiar effect on me that other Brookner books have had: a sense that leaving the characters she presents in the lurch (not reading to the end) would be unfair to them because they are intelligent, if isolated, and perceptive, if undistinguished, and don't...
Continue Reading »
Apr.30.2013
A Desperate Man, by Claes Ryn, professor of politics at the Catholic University of America, is a political novel that can be divided into two parts.
In Part A, Professor Richard Bittenberg mysteriously disappears during a family vacation in Paris. His wife, Helen, conducts a frantic...
Continue Reading »
Apr.29.2013
One of the classics of American literature was written in less than a year by a man who was in his early sixties, dying of cancer, and had never written a book before. The Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant covers one of the crucial periods in American history with candor, honesty...
Continue Reading »
Apr.23.2013
If I were to generalize about Oliver Sacks’s collection of essays entitled, An Anthropologist on Mars, I suppose I would say it confronts the astonishing range of human phenomena that are considered abnormal...but may not be.
Most people experience some form of obsessional thinking or...
Continue Reading »
Apr.18.2013
John Banville's novel, The Sea, is a short, well-conceived, moving novel that is so good that it ought to be better.
I'll have to say this and get it out of the way so I can move on (against the tide, I'm sure, of many critics and readers): the book is overwritten. Banville is so...
Continue Reading »
Apr.15.2013
Patrick Süssind's novel, Perfume, carries with it the scent of Nietzsche at his most grandiose and perverse, Kafka at his most self-amused, Dostoevsky at his most morally contradictory and insightful, and even a bit of Flaubert in the sense that Perfume is relentlessly economical as it...
Continue Reading »
Apr.10.2013
Having just read Oliver Sacks's Hallucinations, I decided to plow through a book that has been on my shelf for a long time: The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James.
My reasoning was as follows: Sacks's book offers a neurologist's explanation for almost any imaginable religious...
Continue Reading »
Apr.07.2013
I have on my desk a drawing by Oliver Sacks of two octopi. He made it in my kitchen in the mid-90s in Germany to prevail in a discussion with my then ten-year-old son about the disposition of optical nerves in octopi. This tells you a lot about Oliver Sacks and Nick...
Continue Reading »
Apr.06.2013
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion displays all of her formidable skills as a writer and perhaps demonstrates a way in which writing itself can be a critical survival technique in the face of great loss and tragedy.
The year in question lasted from the end of 2003 well into 2004....
Continue Reading »
Apr.01.2013
Brooklyn is a quiet, conventional immigrant's tale with the focus on an Irish girl named Eilis Lacey who is fostered in her journey to America by a kindly activist priest, Father Flood, and finds work in a women's shop, then a path to advancement as a bookkeeper through a Brooklyn...
Continue Reading »
Mar.28.2013
The Madonna of the Future is a longish short story whose resonance right now is audible, at the least. The story is an account of an American who has fallen in love with Florence and haunts it as he studies its art--notably Raphael's Madonna of the Chair in the Uffizi Gallery--and prepares...
Continue Reading »
Mar.27.2013
Farewell, My Lovely was Raymond Chandler’s second novel, following The Big Sleep, and I suppose I wouldn’t have read it this week, having read The Big Sleep last week, if it didn’t come in a two-novel edition issued by the Modern Library. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy The Big Sleep or...
Continue Reading »
About Robert
I have been writing fiction since my teens. I continued doing this through a twenty year career in the Foreign Service and now write full-time in the Washington, D.C. suburbs.
Causes Robert Earle Supports
World Wildlife Fund
UNICEF
NPR