Ryder

Now this, dear friends, is a Wonder. For those of you with a soft-spot for Style, a penchant for pastiche, a love of lists and an affection for alliteration. And so, simply: Regarding Ryder, Rape and Rabelaisian riffing: "What ho! Spring again! Rape again, and the Cock not yet at his Crowing! Fie, a......more

Like her masterpiece and, in my opinion one of a handful of the great novels of modernism of the last century Nightwood, Ryder is full of wonderful sumptuous uses of English worthy of the greatest stylists in the language. Ryder also exemplifies Stephen Moore's concept of the novel as a fictional ex......more

A fascinating missing link in literary history: one half Tristram Shandy, one half Ulysses, uniquely female in scope and subject, and as grotesque as anything I've read outside of Gargantua. I can't say I enjoyed reading RYDER - it's extremely inconsistent, morally all over the map, and has barely a......more

Say it for Nightwood as well but in it the authorly voice there is far more present and intrusive, though when it’s so brilliant it’s hard to find upset in this. The greatest trick of Ryder is that of transparency, where you can believe the characters of a fiction will perpetuate its motion self sus......more

As if divinely inspired by an evil polygamous god of excrement and bile and the stickiest of ribaldry. I love Barnes for a lot of reasons, but on a very broad and concise way, I tend to love a prose that is nearly poetry (as I tend to love a poetry that is nearly prose). This novel is so flagrantly......more