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trin's review against another edition
3.0
A series of essays Lodge wrote for the London Independent about, well…the art of fiction. Lodge’s tone is engaging and informative; he never talks down to the reader, and he’s not just showing off, either. My one gripe would be that the essays—having previously been newspaper columns—were all too short: I kept feeling like they ended just when he was starting to really get somewhere. But then, I was trained on lengthy English lectures. I bet Lodge was a rockin’ professor, and I wish he’d been mine.
salahreads's review against another edition
Although art is in no way an objective field, I think it is safe to say that it is not a purely subjective one either. In that respect, certain features and techniques can be gleaned from the vast world of fiction and in this book David Lodge curates some of those key features and techniques that constitute what he calls ‘The Art of Fiction’.
Sense of Place, Magic Realism and The Unreliable Narrator are just some of the 50 techniques identified and explored in this book. To demonstrate each of these techniques, the book provides an excerpt drawn from the Western literary world, modern and classic, referencing the works of Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, Kazuo Ishiguro, and George Orwell—among many others. Lodge provides commentary and elaboration on each of these techniques—explaining them and often linking them back to other chapters of the book.
Of course an art, such as fiction, can never be nailed down to an exact science. There certainly are many more aspects of fiction that do exist but went unmentioned by the book or yet remain undiscovered because literature is always evolving.
Nevertheless, this small, fun book has helped me understand ‘fiction’ much better which has only improved and enriched my reading. It is definitely a book that I wish I had read and studied at school because it has given me so much in terms of how I approach novels now and that’s coming from someone who’s in their twenties and (I’d like to think!) a seasoned reader! Personally, I have my serious gripes with the education system and how little it values reading but I’ll save that for another day.
So to conclude, whether you’re a reader of fiction or even an aspiring novelist, this is a very worthy book to have on your shelf!
shuheda's review against another edition
3.0
Some sections were interesting but others didn't reveal anything of value.
michael5000's review against another edition
5.0
This is the book that taught me how to read books. It provides a comprehensive set of critical tools for the everyday reader, and since its examples all tend to make you want to read the books they come from, it also gives you an outstanding syllabus of novels to try them out on. It was a brand-new book when I bought it; now it's dated but still rock-solid. It makes me giddy to think that I could have chosen not to buy it; I think the 25 years since would have gone a lot differently.
mariebrunelm's review against another edition
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
For a year at the beginning of the 1990s, Lodge wrote weekly articles in a journal about the craft of writing. This book collects these pieces that the author reworked, expanding some of them and rewriting some passages. Each of them is introduced with a quote from an American or British novel (this being the author’s area of expertise, since Lodge worked as an academic as well as a novelist). The writer then writes about a specific theme relevant to the extract chosen, for example suspense, point of view, lists, magical realism, etc. The very short format of each section doesn’t lend itself to a lot of depth, but it works as a good introduction and may encourage readers who are also writers to ask the right questions. I appreciated the fact that each reflection was introduced by a paragraph taken from a published novel, so that there was always a good balance between theory and practice. Although I found this book a little surface-level, I do like the array of themes tackled and how they encourage you to make your own opinion about them.
mbhernandez's review against another edition
4.0
Wow! What an education! I feel like I have a new set of eyes in which to view future fiction.
obscuredbyclouds's review against another edition
3.0
This book from the 90s is a collection of short columns about fiction, with topics like "the ending", "structure of a novel", "the title", etc. Each column/essay is only a few pages long and is centered around an abstract from a piece of literary fiction, mostly novels.
For a book on literary critique it's rather easy to read, also because the short sections aren't linked in any way. You don't need a long attention span. On the other hand, I found the book rather superficial. I'd hoped to maybe learn a bit more that I could use for my own writing, and I didn't. There's just not a lot of substance, and a lot of the columns are rather like "titles: have you ever considered how important a title might be for a story? because it is!" but with a nicer flow and some more intellectual words thrown in.
It's not bad as an introduction to the topics maybe, and it was an okay read, but a bit superfluous.
For a book on literary critique it's rather easy to read, also because the short sections aren't linked in any way. You don't need a long attention span. On the other hand, I found the book rather superficial. I'd hoped to maybe learn a bit more that I could use for my own writing, and I didn't. There's just not a lot of substance, and a lot of the columns are rather like "titles: have you ever considered how important a title might be for a story? because it is!" but with a nicer flow and some more intellectual words thrown in.
It's not bad as an introduction to the topics maybe, and it was an okay read, but a bit superfluous.