Reviews that make you go “wow”

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Morine Krissdóttir must have had an extremely good day after reading Margaret Drabble’s review in the Nov. 16 issue of the Times Literary Supplement of ‘Descents of Memory,’ Krissdóttir’s biography of John Cowper Powys, and the unabridged version of Powys’ Arthurian epic, ‘Porius,’ which she co-edited (both for The Overlook Press). Drabble’s essay/review is superb: Her fascination with a self-destructive author (not a chemically induced sort of behavior, but a carelessness with his manuscripts that made it devilishly hard to sometimes round them up) is contagious.

Drabble closes her insight-rich look at this eccentric, enigmatic 20th century novelist with a monumental claim for the books under review: ‘One can only hope that [‘Porius’] will now find the readers that it deserves, for it is, as critics have argued, fit to be compared both for ambition and achievement with ‘Ulysses,’ while the biography, ‘Descents of Memory,’ deserves to stand with Richard Ellmann’s ‘James Joyce’ as a major work about a major artist.’

Nick Owchar