Issyvoo

Michael Dirda’s opinions

• John Banville

  Banville is most appealing to those who appreciate style, who relish the music of exquisite diction and imagery, who regard the novel as a controlled performance.

  Read the full piece at New York Review of Books Michael Dirda New York Review of Books 2010
• The Tin Drum

  …The Tin Drum mixes fantasy, gallows humor, several pathetic love stories, a tragic family saga, a classic bildungsroman and a powerful account of how great political events affect—usually disastrously—a small group of ordinary people. It grabs your attention from the very first words: “Granted: I’m an inmate in a mental institution… .”

  Read the full piece at The Washington Post Michael Dirda The Washington Post 2009
• The New York Trilogy

  Indeed, much of Auster’s dramatis personae is made up of character actors playing various stock eccentrics and oddballs, while his male protagonists usually resemble one another, being clones of Paul Auster.

  Read the full piece at New York Review of Books Michael Dirda New York Review of Books 2008
• The Gravedigger's Daughter

  The plot can verge on the melodramatic—the bleak cemetery, the tyrannical father, the cruel townfolk, the young girl fleeing with her baby—but similar elements can be found in the great novel-tragedies of Dostoevsky and Zola. […] Oates is never merely a realist; she’s also an artist of the sublime, conveying both awe and grandeur.

  Read the full piece at New York Review of Books Michael Dirda New York Review of Books 2007
• Joyce Carol Oates

  Where Oates excels is in her ability to inhabit her doomed or depraved people—she calls it being “haunted” by them—even as they take us into some very dark places.

  Read the full piece at New York Review of Books Michael Dirda New York Review of Books 2007