Can Bad People Write Good Books?

Can we still appreciate great novels when we know their author behaved despicably?

By Gina Dalfonzo

https://www.plough.com/en/topics/culture/literature/can-bad-people-write-good-books

Little Dorit at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/963

#Books #Literature #LiteraryCriticism

Roddy Doyle: On Tedium and The Shadow of Joyce

Why does Roddy Doyle find James Joyce comparisons boring? Dublin writer Roddy Doyle feels constant talk about Joyce limits new writers and is 'tedious' for his work.

#roddydoyle #jamesjoyce #dublinwriters #irishliterature #literarycriticism

https://newsletter.tf/roddy-doyle-dublin-james-joyce-comparisons-boring/

Dublin writer Roddy Doyle says constant talk about James Joyce is 'boring'. He feels it makes it hard for new writers to show their own unique style, a common problem for many artists.

#roddydoyle #jamesjoyce #dublinwriters #irishliterature #literarycriticism
https://newsletter.tf/roddy-doyle-dublin-james-joyce-comparisons-boring/

T.A.E.’s Book Reviews – Bone, Vol. 3: Eyes of the Storm by Jeff Smith

Jeff Smith’s Bone, Vol. 3: Eyes of the Storm is the series beginning to reveal its full weather system: comic mischief is still everywhere, but beneath the laughter the atmosphere darkens, thickens, and begins to press in with real narrative force. What makes this volume so compelling is not simply that “something happens,” but that the author learns how to make the ordinary and the epic feel inseparable. A storm is no longer just weather; it becomes mood, omen, and dramatic architecture. The title is beautifully apt, because this is a book about being caught in the centre of forces larger than oneself, while still trying to keep one’s footing in mud, fear, and family chaos.

One of Smith’s great strengths is his tonal range. He can move from broad comedy to genuine menace without breaking the story’s spell. The Bone cousins remain distinct comic personalities, especially Phoney Bone, whose bluster and self-interest continue to create friction wherever he goes, but the humour now feels increasingly precarious. It is no longer just there to entertain; it exposes character. Phoney’s schemes reveal his vanity and desperation, while Smiley and Fone Bone show, in different ways, how innocence and foolishness can look deceptively similar until the stakes sharpen. Smith understands that characterization is often strongest when placed under pressure, and the storm of this volume serves exactly that function.

The book’s visual storytelling is especially sophisticated. Smith’s line is clean and approachable, but its clarity is deceptive: he uses it to stage tension with remarkable precision. Weather, shadows, and enclosing landscapes give the volume a sense of threshold and instability. Rooms feel temporary. Roads feel vulnerable. Even moments of quiet seem haunted by what is about to arrive. The artist’s compositions often make the reader feel that the world is leaning forward, as if listening. That sense of anticipation is one of the volume’s deepest achievements.

There is also a notable widening of the series’ mythic dimension. The earlier volumes introduce the world’s oddity; this one deepens its memory. Dreams, legends, and hints of old conflict begin to gather more weight, particularly around Thorn and the mysterious forces that seem to be awakening around her. Smith never rushes this material. He allows the mythic elements to emerge gradually, so that the reader experiences discovery rather than exposition. That patience gives the fantasy an unusually lived-in quality. The story feels less like an invention being explained than a world remembering itself.

At the same time, Eyes of the Storm remains grounded in very human concerns: fear of loss, the burden of responsibility, the fragility of trust, the comic absurdity of greed. That balance is what keeps the book from becoming merely atmospheric. Even when the larger myth begins to loom, Smith remembers that his characters are still small, fallible creatures stumbling through danger with incomplete knowledge. In that respect, the volume has a quiet emotional intelligence. It does not pretend that wonder and terror are opposites. They are twin experiences, often arriving together.

What stays with the reader most is the sense that Smith is deepening his world without abandoning its charm. Eyes of the Storm is less sprawling than consequential; it turns the screw. Its power lies in the way it binds comedy to suspense, and fantasy to emotional uncertainty. By the end, the storm has not merely passed over the valley—it has entered the story’s bloodstream. This is the kind of volume that expands a series’ meaning while still feeling playful, and that is a rare accomplishment.

T.A.E.’s Book Reviews – Bone, Vol. 2: The Great Cow Race by Jeff Smith

Jeff Smith’s Bone, Vol. 2: The Great Cow Race is the point at which Bone begins to reveal the full strength of its design. What first seemed in volume 1 like an amiably strange fantasy becomes, here, something sharper and more deliberate: a comic pastoral that is also a study in greed, spectacle, loyalty, and the thin veil between rustic comedy and genuine menace. The author deepens the world not by abandoning charm, but by making charm itself unstable. The result is a book that is funny, swift, and deceptively layered.

At the centre of the volume is the Great Cow Race, a local celebration that Smith turns into both set piece and social microcosm. The race is not merely an eccentric regional custom; it is a lens through which the book observes community life. The townspeople gather, wager, brag, and jostle, and the event becomes a small theatre of human desire. Smith understands that festivity often exposes character more clearly than crisis does. Phoney Bone, with his appetite for schemes and shortcuts, treats the race as an opportunity for manipulation, while Fone Bone remains a more accidental witness to the moral weather around him. The contrast between the cousins is one of the volume’s most effective structural devices: Phoney embodies appetite without wisdom, while Fone Bone carries the book’s conscience, curiosity, and emotional openness.

Smith’s writing is especially strong in the way it balances comedy with threat. The volume is full of slapstick and comic exaggeration, yet the Rat Creatures and the ominous currents surrounding Thorn prevent the book from settling into lightness alone. The juxtaposition is crucial. A scene may begin in broad humour and end with a shadow crossing the frame, and Smith lets that tonal shift register without strain. This gives Bone its singular atmosphere: it is never merely cute, because danger is always at the edge of the joke. The book’s humour therefore does not deflate tension; it sharpens it.

Thorn, in this volume, becomes more compelling as a character of transition. She is not yet fully aware of the larger forces gathering around her, but she is no longer simply a local girl in a small town. Smith gives her a kind of inner brightness that makes her feel like the moral centre of the narrative even when the plot is distracted by chicanery and comic disorder. Her scenes have a calm, grounded energy that contrasts beautifully with the noisier antics of the Bone cousins. She helps anchor the book’s emotional realism. In a story with rats, dragons, and folklore, Smith knows that the most important thing is to make the human heart recognizable.

Visually, The Great Cow Race is a masterclass in graphic storytelling economy. Smith’s linework is clean, expressive, and highly readable, but what stands out most is his command of timing. He knows when to crowd a panel with motion and when to let silence or a held expression carry the beat. The race sequence, in particular, demonstrates how comics can stage action with a rhythm more akin to cinema and theatre than prose alone. The page turns create punchlines; the panel layout becomes part of the joke. Yet the artistry is not merely mechanical. The artist’s drawings also carry tone, giving the valley a lived-in warmth even when the plot turns uneasy.

Thematically, the volume is preoccupied with value: what is worth chasing, what is worth selling, and what is worth protecting. Phoney’s schemes make greed look ridiculous, but not harmless. Smith treats avarice as a kind of comic self-deception, a belief that the world can be reduced to leverage and profit. Against this, the book places friendship, loyalty, and simple attentiveness as quieter but sturdier forms of value. Fone Bone’s affection for Thorn, and his generally unheroic but sincere manner, make him one of the book’s most quietly persuasive protagonists. He is not impressive in the conventional sense, but he is trustworthy, and that matters more in Smith’s moral universe.

What makes The Great Cow Race so effective is that it expands the series without explaining it away. The mythology remains partial, the dangers remain half-seen, and the world remains larger than any single volume can contain. This book resists the temptation to over-clarify. Instead, it deepens atmosphere, strengthens character contrast, and lets the reader feel that the story is moving from whimsy toward destiny. That is the book’s hidden achievement: beneath the jokes and rural bustle, it quietly teaches us how to read uncertainty.

In the end, The Great Cow Race is a comic fantasy of remarkable control. It is playful without being flimsy, accessible without being thin, and warm without becoming sentimental. Jeff Smith has a gift for making a reader smile and then, almost in the same breath, feel the ground shift. This volume shows that Bone is not just an entertaining series of adventures; it is a carefully tuned work of narrative balance, where comedy, folklore, and foreboding are all part of the same spell.

A quotation from Neal Stephenson

Neal Stephenson (b. 1959) American novelist
Reamde, Part 1 “Nine Dragons – Thanksgiving,” prologue (2011)

More about this quote: wist.info/stephenson-neal/2148…

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #nealstephenson #author #critic #literarycriticism #review #writer #writing

T.A.E.’s Book Reviews – Bone, Vol. 1: Out from Boneville by Jeff Smith

Jeff Smith’s Bone, Vol. 1: Out from Boneville is a remarkable feat of tonal balance: at once a woodland fable, a sly comic adventure, and the first movement of an unexpectedly expansive epic. What appears, at first glance, to be a light, cartoonish fantasy quickly reveals a work of real formal intelligence. Smith understands that innocence can be a mask for danger, and humour a vehicle for dread. The result is a book that feels deceptively simple on the surface while steadily opening into something mythic.

The volume begins by displacing its protagonists from the familiar logic of the everyday and depositing them into a landscape that is both whimsical and ominous. The Bone cousins—Fone Bone, Phoney Bone, and Smiley Bone—arrive as figures of comic incongruity: small, white, and apparently harmless, yet immediately entangled in forces they do not understand. Smith’s brilliance lies in how fully he commits to this mismatch. Their rounded, almost toy-like designs stand in contrast to the grandeur of the world around them, creating a visual irony that is central to the book’s charm. The art invites laughter, but the narrative keeps reminding us that laughter is only one layer of experience.

One of the volume’s most appealing qualities is its tonal elasticity. The author moves from slapstick to menace with astonishing ease. A line like “We’re not in Boneville anymore” captures more than a joke; it signals a threshold-crossing into uncertainty, a classic fairy-tale gesture recast with comic economy. The book’s world is governed by this same doubleness. Even the supposedly comic figures—especially Phoney Bone, whose greed and bluster constantly complicate the group’s survival—have a satiric sharpness that prevents the story from becoming merely cute. The humour is never decorative. It reveals character.

At the same time, Out from Boneville is deeply interested in the archetypal patterns of quest narrative. Fone Bone’s quiet curiosity, his evident openness to wonder, and his immediate attraction to Thorn and the valley’s strange inhabitants position him as a kind of ingenuous knight or pilgrim. But Smith resists the usual heroic polish. Fone Bone is earnest, not triumphant; vulnerable, not destined. That vulnerability gives the story emotional credibility. The adventure feels earned because it is entered by someone who still believes in the possibility of meaning.

The book also demonstrates this writer’s gift for world-building through suggestion rather than exposition. He does not over-explain the valley’s mysteries; he lets them accrue through atmosphere, gesture, and interruption. This method gives the narrative a strong sense of submerged history. We feel that the landscape has memory, that the social relations around Thorn and Gran’ma Ben are part of a larger, older conflict. The reader is not given the whole architecture at once, only glimpses—enough to feel the depth beneath the surface. That restraint is one of the volume’s greatest strengths.

Visually, Smith works in a clean, supple line that appears simple but is highly controlled. His pages have an exceptional clarity of staging, allowing action, expression, and mood to coexist without confusion. He can render a comic chase, a quiet domestic scene, or a moment of uncanny stillness with equal fluency. The pacing benefits enormously from this economy. The reader is never overloaded, yet the book never feels thin. Instead, it achieves a rare clarity that makes the more dramatic developments land with greater force.

What gives the first volume its lasting appeal, though, is its emotional tone: a mingling of wonder, threat, and loneliness. The title itself, Out from Boneville, suggests departure, exile, and the beginning of story. These characters have already left one world behind, and the new one they enter does not promise safety. In that sense, Smith is writing a coming-of-age narrative disguised as a fantasy romp. The book’s deeper subject is not merely adventure but dislocation—what it means to be unmoored and yet still capable of friendship, courage, and curiosity.

In the end, Bone, Vol. 1 succeeds because it treats enchantment seriously without losing its sense of play. It is funny without being trivial, accessible without being shallow, and mythic without becoming ponderous. Jeff Smith’s achievement is to make a comic book feel like folklore in the making. The first volume is not just an introduction; it is an invitation into a world where the silly and the solemn are inseparable, and where even the smallest figures may be carrying the weight of a very old story.

#CCLS2026: 12th and last talk is "From #LiteraryCriticism to #LiteraryStudies: #TopicModeling Argentine Academic Journals (1982–2024)" by Federico Gabriel Cortés, analyzing the topics of 42 years of academic publishing of literary studies research in Argentina.

Preprint: https://doi.org/10.26083/tuda-7981

T.A.E.’s Book Review – Zen and Japanese Culture by D. T. Suzuki

D. T. Suzuki’s Zen and Japanese Culture is one of those books that is less interested in argument as a sealed system than in revelation as a mode of prose. First published in 1938 and later revised and enlarged in 1959, it gathers essays on “What Is Zen?,” Japanese art culture, Confucianism, the samurai, swordsmanship, haiku, tea, and love of nature, so that Zen appears not as a narrow doctrine but as a living current running through aesthetics, discipline, and perception. 

At its best, Suzuki writes with the compressed intensity of a spiritual aphorist. He describes the mind in its “isness” and insists that “the artist’s world is one of free creation,” and that such creation rises “directly and im-mediately” from things themselves. Those phrases are more than decorative mystical language; they are the book’s governing style and philosophy. Suzuki is trying to show that Zen is not chiefly an abstract theology, but a way of seeing in which the barrier between inner life and outer form dissolves. 

This is why the book moves so confidently from meditation to the sword, from a haiku to a tea bowl, from a warrior ethic to a garden path. In the introduction to the modern edition, Richard M. Jaffe explains that Suzuki uses these arts to illuminate Zen ideas such as Emptiness, “no-mind,” satori, and non-dualism, and that tea ceremony, in Suzuki’s account, becomes an expression of “simplicity” and “poverty, solitariness, and absolutism.” The book’s great wager is that culture itself can be read as spiritual evidence. 

That wager gives the book its brilliance and its danger. The introduction also notes that Suzuki’s broader cultural claims have been widely criticized, especially for encouraging readers to imagine an unchanging, essential “Zen” embedded everywhere in Japanese life. Read now, the book can feel both opening and closing at once: opening, because it makes art tremble with metaphysical possibility; closing, because it sometimes turns Japan into a unified symbolic mirror for Suzuki’s idea of Zen. Still, even the critique confirms the book’s force: it helped shape global perceptions of Zen and remains historically significant for that reason. 

As a literary and philosophical text, then, Zen and Japanese Culture is not a neutral study so much as a visionary performance. Its prose seeks to enact the very immediacy it praises, and when it succeeds, it produces a rare intensity: culture becomes contemplation, and contemplation becomes form. Its weaknesses are real, but so is its magnetism. Few books have been so influential in making Zen feel not merely thinkable, but visible.

T.A.E.’s Book Review – Perfume: The Story of a Murder by Patrick Süskind

Perfume: The Story of a Murder is one of the most unsettling novels of the late twentieth century because it turns a seemingly intangible sense into the engine of plot, desire, and metaphysics. Patrick Süskind does not merely tell the story of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, a man born without personal odour; he builds an entire moral universe around smell, then asks what kind of human being emerges when the world is understood not through ethics, but through scent. The result is a dark, feverish fable about genius without conscience, desire without reciprocity, and artistry severed from love.

At the centre of the novel is Grenouille, one of literature’s most chillingly original protagonists. He is not a conventional villain, because he lacks the emotional life that would make villainy legible as motive. He is instead an intelligence of pure appetite and calculation, a being whose gift is so extraordinary that it becomes a deformity of the soul. Süskind repeatedly stresses Grenouille’s near-supernatural olfactory talent, and this matters because smell in the novel is not simply sensory detail; it is a form of knowledge, even a form of domination. Grenouille does not encounter people as persons. He encounters them as olfactory structures, reducible to traces, components, and formulas. The human body becomes, for him, an archive of extractable essence.

That premise gives the novel its most disturbing philosophical force. The author suggests that the most intimate sense is also the most invasive. Sight allows distance; smell abolishes it. The novel’s descriptions of crowded streets, markets, tanneries, and slaughterhouses are not merely grotesque atmosphere. They are arguments about embodiment. Paris, in this book, is less a city than a fermenting organism, a place where human life is overwhelmed by excrement, rot, sweat, fat, blood, and perfume. This constant saturation of odour makes civilization look thin, almost theatrical. Beneath manners and culture lies the animal fact of the body.

Süskind’s prose is especially effective because it moves between clinical precision and Gothic excess. He writes with the cool attention of an anatomist and the relish of a decadent fabulist. The famous scent-making scenes are not just plot mechanisms; they are acts of miniature alchemy. Grenouille’s craft resembles art, science, and sorcery at once. But the novel insists on the monstrous implication of this craft: if beauty can be manufactured, then morality can be manufactured too. Grenouille’s perfumes do not reveal truth; they produce consent. In that sense, the novel becomes a savage meditation on charisma, propaganda, and the seductions of aesthetic power. The language of attraction is exposed as manipulable chemistry.

One of the book’s most profound ironies is that Grenouille possesses extraordinary sensitivity to the world while remaining spiritually absent from it. He is all perception and no relation. He can detect the most delicate human nuance in scent, but he cannot experience pity, tenderness, or mutuality. This makes him a horrifying inversion of the Romantic artist: a creator who seeks the sublime, but only to consume it. The novel’s repeated concern with “essence” is therefore double-edged. Grenouille hunts for the essential fragrance of things, yet the more he extracts essence, the more he evacuates life.

The narrative structure strengthens this moral bleakness. Süskind frames Grenouille’s career almost like a rise-and-fall legend, but the “rise” is parasitic and the “fall” is oddly liberating. The novel is not a simple crime story. It is a parable of genius detached from human purpose. Grenouille’s search for the perfect perfume becomes a quest for immortality, but what he really wants is not remembrance or love; it is annihilation of his own lack. The irony is devastating: he masters the power to compel adoration, yet cannot make himself believe in it. His triumph is empty because his selfhood is empty.

The book’s ending is one of the most brilliant and grotesque conclusions in modern fiction. Rather than restoring moral order, Süskind stages a collapse of moral categories themselves. The response to Grenouille’s perfect perfume is not justice but ravenous reverence. Human beings, stripped of discernment by desire, become a mob of appetites. That is the novel’s most savage insight: civilization may be more fragile than we want to admit, and our noblest judgments may be no more secure than our senses.

What makes Perfume unforgettable is that it is both repellent and beautiful. Süskind compels us to inhabit a world of stink, lust, slaughter, and genius, then reveals that beauty itself may be inseparable from corruption. It is a novel about the power to enchant, and the terror of enchantment without conscience. Few books are so obsessed with the physical world, and fewer still use that obsession to expose the abyss beneath human civilization.