Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • Indulging in the immediate future

    Indulging in the immediate future

    In Red Moon Kim Stanley Robinson turns his attention to the Earth’s satellite in much the same way that he has turned his attention to Mars and Antarctica, among other places. That is to say, with knowledge, rigour, and an unerring instinct for where the stories are. In many ways Robinson’s work can bridge a… Read more

  • Mystery abides

    Mystery abides

    First-person narratives often use the grammatical device of the first-person pronoun to solicit the reader’s close identification with the narrator, without letting go of the privileges pertaining to a distanced, omniscient point-of-view. Such stories usually fail to elicit the immersion they are aiming at for me—which is not to say that I don’t enjoy them,… Read more

  • Difficult questions

    Difficult questions

    Josienne Clarke has a vocal style. Some of its appurtenances, such as its precise diction, its half-rounded vowels, its purity of tone, and its inevitable but particular phrasing, signal an allegiance to British folk music traditions, but there is a large and important difference between working ‘in’ a style, and ‘having’ a style. Nobody sings… Read more

  • Needful history

    Needful history

    A book with a title like The Cambridge History Of Medicine makes an obvious claim to be definitive, but also stakes its territory in the domain of tertiary documentation—we don’t expect its authors to be sharing the bleeding edge of their research, or making controversial claims, but to be providing a digest of the scholarly… Read more

  • Complicated fun

    Complicated fun

    In my current mission to read Neal Stephenson’s entire oeuvre, I’ve been zigzagging between his earlier and later publications. If there’s one difference between his early and late work that I can put my finger on easily, it’s the increasing prominence of female characters, and particularly female point-of-view characters. In The Rise And Fall Of… Read more

  • More than its parts

    More than its parts

    Neither One Of Us was the last album Gladys Knight & The Pips recorded for Motown, released after they’d left for Buddha Records in New York. It was a solid commercial success, although the group’s highest chart positions and best-remembered singles would come in the years they spent with Buddha. It’s an absolutely classic slab… Read more