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Swimming in magic realism

Saturday, 22nd June 2002

First things first. The winner of this year's Commonwealth Writers' Prize, compared by the critic in the New York Times to, let us see, Sterne, Joyce, Melville and Garcia Marquez, printed up in a variety of coloured inks, containing delicate portraits of its piscine subjects, Gould's Book of Fish is a thoroughly arresting post-modern artefact. This is, on the one hand, its great advantage - that sense of a dazzling imagination reaching out to manipulate past time - and, on the other, its singular drawback, in that, in the last resort, the reader is being invited not to immerse himself in an invented world but to admire a performance. This, it might be said, is the occupational disease of the whole post-modern movement in literature: everything reduced and made subservient not to that illusion of felt experience with which the novel managed to get by for a couple of centuries but to the slightly less enticing spectacle of the writer at work on the text.

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