Reviews

Reviews of The Literary Lunch: Selected Stories

“Dean writes with a controlled lyricism – his prose is welded to an unpretentiousness that both counterpoises and intensifies its musicality. At the same time, he displays a dark, satirical streak: tales of sinister clowns at the Adelaide Writers Week, or the boy who gets kicked out of a posh school for revealin g his father’s ignominious profession, are written with Dean’s unique self-denigrating flair and a talent for dissecting pomposity.

“He’s a writer’s writer and his vision of the author resembles that of Proust’s Bergotte: a character capable of artistic heroism only by virtue of his abject human failings. In spite of that (or perhaps because of it) Dean has won many awards and plaudits from nearly every quarter. He deserves the praise; his short fiction is among the best in the country.”
The Age, Saturday, 8/01/2005

Reviews:

Review by Cameron Woodhead, The Age, Review section: Books, Saturday, January 8, 2005.
TASMANIAN author Geoffrey Dean has been writing short stories for almost 50 years and has pretty much perfected the craft. The Literary Lunch is an impressive collection of his work. Dean writes with a controlled lyricism – his prose is wel ded to an unpretentiousness that both counterpoises and intensifies its musicality. At the same time, he displays a dark, satirical streak: tales of sinister clowns at the Adelaide Writers Week, or the boy who gets kicked out of a posh school for revealin g his father’s ignominious profession, are written with Dean’s unique self-denigrating flair and a talent for dissecting pomposity. He’s a writer’s writer and his vision of the author resembles that of Proust’s Bergotte: a character capable of artistic heroism only by virtue of his abject human failings. In spite of that (or perhaps because of it) Dean has won many awards and plaudits from nearly every quarter. He deserves the praise; his short fiction is among the best in the country.” The Age, Saturday, January 8, 2005

The 19 short stories in this collection are a kind of ‘greatest hits’ retrospective of a distinguished literary career that is far from over.More reviews:


The Saturday Mercury, 1/1/2005 (Robert Cox);
The Sunday Tasmanian, 19/12/2005 (Christopher Bantick)
JAS review of books, n.34, June 2005 (Bianca Ferguson, University of Melbourne)