Kevin Breathnach on Murakami's Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage:
[Tsuskuru's] story is an allegory of the journey made by the prose in which it is told. It is not a happy story.
Eugene McCarraher on Terry Eagleton's Culture and the Death of God:
In the life and death of Jesus—resurrection goes unmentioned—Eagleton discovers the most stringent and fundamental rebuke to capitalism, as well as the point of departure for any future revolutionary politics. It is in that crucible of downward mobility that “a new configuration of faith, culture, and politics might be born.” This is unvarnished liberation theology, and here Eagleton returns to the prophetic Marxism that animated his earlier career.
Max Winter on Denis Johnson's The Laughing Monsters:
Some might say this is. . .not believable, but this would only be if you didn’t want to accept the poetic structure of the book, in which characters are less characters than emblems, and the story less a story than a mathematical equation, about figures allowed to spin around each other in a landscape which sometimes embraces them and sometimes rejects them, committing deeds which posit life and death as contrasting hypotheticals.
Winter here comes to a conclusion similar to the one I reached in my review of the novel, in which I described Johnson's fiction as essentially allegorical.
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