Brian McHale

R.I.P. Christine Brooke-Rose

I just heard that Christine Brooke-Rose passed away.

I first came across her work thanks to Brian McHale’s Postmodernist Fiction (1987), where he wrote about her 1975 novel Thru.

At the time, I was deeply into concrete poetry, in particular novelists who used concrete poetry techniques (Kenneth Patchen, B.S. Johnson, Ann Quin). So I was hooked. I picked up the 1986 Christine Brooke-Rose Omnibus, which contains Thru as well as its three “companion” novels: Out (1964), Such (1966), and Between (1968). All of them are decidedly unusual; like Johnson and Quin, Brooke-Rose was heavily inspired by the French New Novel of Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras, and Nathalie Sarraute. (She translated Robbe-Grillet’s In the Labyrinth.) Like all of those authors, Brooke-Rose was a brilliant maker of contemporary fiction who deserves to be more widely read.

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Author News / 20 Comments
March 22nd, 2012 / 12:40 pm

Film & Reviews

Mondo Review/Reflection/Notes On Inception

The other day, Lily wrote about how she “found Inception potentially very interesting but in the end quite disappointing.” I didn’t get a chance to see it until yesterday, but I had a different reaction: I found it uber freaking fascinating.

My thoughts after the jump…with Spoilers Aplenty, so beware if you haven’t seen it yet!

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105 Comments
July 24th, 2010 / 12:11 pm