James Purdon

Tape Measures

Amnesia

By

Faber & Faber 377pp £18.99 order from our bookshop

The exemplary creative writers of our time – we may as well admit it – are not the novelists but the computer coders. As algorithms and subroutines have become the infrastructure of our daily digital lives, the writers of code have fulfilled the novelist’s dream, building alternate worlds out of language. Does it matter that the languages in question happen to be Java and Python rather than English or Spanish? Like the Knight of the Rueful Countenance, we are all now part-time inhabitants of spaces fabricated by writing, virtual worlds that shape our sense of reality as surely as Amadis de Gaula and Feliciano de Silva shaped Don Quixote’s.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • Lecture on war and peace in 19th-century Europe by Professor Sir Richard Evans, Thurs 25 Oct, 6.30pm Europe House… ,
    • 'Why, throughout the world, are so many people fascinated by the fiction and reality of espionage? And why of all p… ,
    • . here on books, Muriel Spark and life's tangled dance ,
    • RT : There aren't enough aggressive subtitles these days: ,
    • Churchill's on the cover of the October edition of the magazine. Piers Brendon reviews two new books about the Brit… ,
    • 'Readers have no more power to predict where the next story is going to take them than the prisoners had to determi… ,
    • 'Ho was no Soviet or Chinese puppet. He was a nationalist first and foremost. Had the Americans just realised this.… ,
    Follow Us