The Tragedy of Arthur

The very first thing I did after finishing The Tragedy of Author - Arthur Phillips's ingenious faux-memoir - was to Google to see what was true and what wasn't...only to find that much of Phillips's traceable past has been erased. Did he really have a gay twin sister named Dana, a scam artist father......more

Arthur Phillips is our most reliable creator of unreliable narrators. And in the case of this book, it is "Arthur Phillips" himself who narrates. That is the "Arthur Phillips" who is the author of Prague, The Egyptologist, Angelica, The Song Is You, as well as the discoverer of what may be a newly d......more

The best book I've read this year, and well worth a review: I shall write one when this damn essay is finished. In the meantime, read this book. *Time Passes* I found The Tragedy of Arthur in the ‘classics’ section of my local bookshop. This, possibly, is a bit presumptuous. Arthur is a play by Willi......more

I see that I am in the small minority of readers who dislikes this novel. I also admit that I did not read the play itself after suffering through the author's Introduction. The pace of the book is very slow, endlessly repetitive, and self-absorbed, like the fictional author who shares his name with......more

When I’ve described this novel to friends, it’s always sounded interesting. That’s strange because I actually struggled to finish it, and only did so out of a sense of duty and respect to the person who enthusiastically bestowed it on me. It’s another in that line of novels that masquerades as a mem......more