PublishedOxford University Press, July 2015 |
ISBN9780198739593 |
FormatSoftcover, 200 pages |
Dimensions19.5cm × 14.2cm × 1.2cm |
In this book the distinguished novelist Tim Parks presents reading a novel as an exciting and dangerous meeting with another person. For the novelist, writing the book is part of life, a card played in the long psychological game of dealing with the world. For readers, their reaction to a work of fiction is likewise part of life as we seek a structure or strategy of understanding for ourselves. Engaged with numerous great novels and with focused discussion of
James Joyce, Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens. D. H. Lawrence, and J.M. Coetzee, The Novel: A Survival Skill gets much closer to the real experience of reading and writing, the mysteries of our positive
and negative responses, than traditional literary criticism. Parks also devotes some time to exploring his own writing in the light of the arguments he is putting forward. The result is a compelling, risk-taking account of what is at stake in the lived experience of writing and of reading. The book also suggests why so much literary criticism seems entirely arcane and irrelevant to the 'ordinary' reader.
