Issyvoo

Jonathan Raban’s opinions

• Charlotte Rogan

  Charlotte Rogan is not unfriendly to cliché, but at her best she writes her way through hackneyed and archetypal situations with such conviction that she refreshes them and gives them the power of myth.

  Read the full piece at New York Review of Books Jonathan Raban New York Review of Books 2012
• The Lifeboat

  Charlotte Rogan is not unfriendly to cliché, but at her best she writes her way through hackneyed and archetypal situations with such conviction that she refreshes them and gives them the power of myth.

  Read the full piece at The New York Review of Books Jonathan Raban The New York Review of Books 2012
• The Lifeboat

  The Lifeboat is both an enthralling story of survival at sea and a novel that is satisfyingly concerned with the character of its own storytelling… the book is an ambiguous document, at once self-exculpatory and incriminating, and this page-by-page doubleness forces the reader to weigh Grace’s words with unusual care and caution.

  Read the full piece at New York Review of Books Jonathan Raban New York Review of Books 2012
• Infinite Jest

  You find yourself performing a parody of scholarship as you shuttle between the text and the endnotes, and reach for the dictionary to look up “imbricate,” “annulation,” or whether “amonymous” is a misprint or a word in its own right. (It is, I think, the former—unless it’s a coinage deriving from Amon, the goetic demon and a marquis of Hell.)

  Read the full piece at New York Review of Books Jonathan Raban New York Review of Books 2011