Wormholes: Essays and Occasional Writings - Hardcover

Fowles, John

3.76

334 ratings by Goodreads

9780224044561: Wormholes: Essays and Occasional Writings

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0224044567 ISBN 13: 9780224044561

Publisher: Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1998

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This collection includes articles written for magazines, book reviews from the THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW and the IRISH PRESS and forewords and introductions he has written for books including THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. There is a tribute to William Golding, written on his 75th birthday and some autobiographical pieces such as his essay 'On being English and not British' and the title essay, 'I Write Therefore I Am'.

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Review:

John Fowles calls his essays "little bits of what I am" and declares--rather than fears--himself "only too well aware that there are many they will not please. "The 30 pieces collected in Wormholes display this enigmatic author's concerns (above all with the natural world), disdain (for passing artistic and critical fashions and various other 20th- century "manias") and crankiness. Pity the tidy suburban gardener who comes upon the following generalization: "In America, freedom from crabgrass becomes a test of social acceptability; the man with the best roses walks six inches taller." Fowles knows he's going to push people's buttons, and clearly enjoys doing so. Yet he's serious when it comes to personal and public responsibility. He's also dead right in thinking that natural life needs privacy, untidiness, and its fair share of insects. From the first entry, "I Write Therefore I Am"--as much a tirade against the so-called literary world as it is a love letter to literature--Fowles is confrontational, casual and astoundingly learned. He's also highly amusing. Witness the opening squib of "Gather Ye Starlets" (1965): "I had better confess at once that I am writing about a subject with which I have never slept; and nothing, as Genet has five or six hundred times reminded us, is quite so immoral as total innocence." Readers have long delighted in Fowles's philosophical fiction because he makes thinking a great game, and his essays openly engage--and outrage--in similar fashion. Wormholes may well be the best intellectual and emotional biography we will ever have of the man who created such modern classics as The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman.

Review:

"Fowles's mind is as lively, tangy and quirkily textured as Stilton" (Observer)

"A splendidly uplifting book" (Richard Mabey)

"Anyone familiar with books such as The French Lieutenant's Woman and The Magus will already know that Fowles is a perceptive and intelligent writer, but this collection shows him to be as fascinating and entertaining in his non-fiction as he is in his novels. Indeed, Wormholes is something of an embarassment of riches, there are so many marvellous things in here" (Hampstead & Highgate Express)

"John Fowles is a magnificent novelist who has written two masterpieces but who has a reluctance to give precise endings to his stories... In the wise and beautifully written essays and biographical pieces of Wormholes he indicates why this is so" (Daily Telegraph)

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