It was a sort of magic spun by Greer an excellent literary trick. And then I really, really cared what happened to him. Then I started to like him and root for hm. Lost. Such a character should sink under the weight of his own disappointments and frailties, but a strange thing happened in this book. Insecure, Lonely, in a self-imposed sort of way. The reader tags along, and finds out about his life and loves lost along the way.Īrthur Less - lovelorn (twice over). And so he embarks on a trip around the world - Mexico, Germany, France, Morocco, India, Japan. Arthur Less is introduced as a minor novelist, about to turn 50, and feeling a battered by a a betrayal of love in particular, and life in general. And also joining a list of literary novels whose books are named after (and robustly inhabited by) their protagonists - Bellow’s Herzog, Lewis’s Babbitt, Williams’s Stoner. The title takes its etymology from the last name of Arthur Less, and double entendres abound, the surname nestling in warmly with Mr. Which strikes me a tad ascetic, now that I think about it.

And then there are the hundreds of reviews, which I would prefer not to read before I do my own. The other challenge is to read through the hyperbolic shouts that adorn the cover, most from writers who command a large acreage of my literary mindscape, and to try and maintain objectivity in the face of them. One of the challenges in reviewing the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction is that it has done exactly that - won one of two most prestigious prizes in English fiction (the other being the Booker Prize), and so I can assume that some very wise and well-read judges had made this decision for sound reasons.

Less pulitzer prize winning novel