Alan Cheuse

How To Put This 'Delicate'-ly ... Not Le Carre's Best Work

Alan Cheuse — Thu, 16 May 2013 11:03:00 +0000

Some novelists interest us because they turn the light of a style we enjoy on whatever subject they take up. Some novelists we enjoy because they have found a great subject and work it well and lovingly. John le Carre seems to belong to the latter group, having found his vein of fiction gold in the world of Cold War espionage.

Real Writing, Real Life In Salter's 'All That Is'

Alan Cheuse — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 11:03:00 +0000

"There comes a time," James Salter writes in the epigraph for his new novel, All That Is, "when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real."

There's an echo here of the great 17th-century Spanish playwright Calderon de la Barca's famous lines, "Life is a dream, and dreams even are dreams." In Calderon's play, the king who utters those lines defers only to God as the source of truth in human reality. Salter, like most of us modern writers, looks only to art.

Tigers, Scholars And Smugglers, All 'At Home' In Sprawling Novel

Alan Cheuse — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 11:03:00 +0000

It's difficult to predict the reception Where Tigers Are at Home will receive in the United States. The winner of France's Prix Medicis in 2008, this big, sprawling novel (in a translation by Mike Mitchell) comes to us from Algerian-born writer, philosopher and world traveler Jean-Marie Blas de Robles, author of more than a dozen works of fiction, poetry and nonfiction. This book — the first of his to appear in the U.S. in English — stands as a challenge to readers who want their fiction to offer a quick pay-off.

Book Review: 'Where Tigers Are At Home'

Alan Cheuse — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 21:39:00 +0000

Transcript

MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:

From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

And I'm Audie Cornish. Our book reviewer, Alan Cheuse, has just traveled to Brazil and back in an 800-page novel. The book is called "Where Tigers Are At Home." It's by a French novelist named Jean-Marie Blas de Robles and it's just out in English. Here's Alan's review.

ALAN CHEUSE, BYLINE: A Frenchman named Von Wogau, a divorced and retired journalist, lives in a small town in the northeastern region of Brazil.

Hamid's How-To for Success, 'Filthy Rich' In Irony

Alan Cheuse — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 12:03:00 +0000

Novelist Mohsin Hamid lives in Lahore, Pakistan, quite some distance from the Long Island of Jay Gatsby. But his new novel — his third and, I think, best so far — reminded me of F. Scott Fitzgerald's quintessential American work. As I read this novel about the dark and light of success in a world of social instability, I kept asking myself how much I might be inflating the value of Hamid's novel by rating it so highly.