Art Garfunkel famously keeps track of the books he has read since 1968. As of writing this, the count is 1327 (he does not add a review). I thought I could do something similar but I am adding short reviews of books as I read them, and I rake my brain over what I read over the last decades. This is, evidently, a work-in-progress: there are 584 reviews so far. Titles marked with a * are particular favorites.
Jim Crace: Arcadia *
Jim Crace is one of my favourite authors, and this is a major opus. He may be “old-fashioned” as much as he is certainly not a post-modernist but firmly rooted in the grand historical tradition of narratology. Tant pis if he did not get the meme about the end of the grand narrative: every book of his, one way or the other, proves that narrative, grand or petit, is very much alive and doing very well indeed. That his politics are close to mine is just another bonus. The subject of this book is, in its own way, the original accumulation, the rise of capitalism, the temporal and physical divide between rural production and late capitalism, and on and on. But it is, first of all, a very good story, and in no way a political pamphlet.