Reviews for Programming: ALGOL

The average rating for Programming: ALGOL based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-04-05 00:00:00 Jacob Goldfarb Simpson won the inaugural Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award for this in 1991. Her protagonists are women disillusioned with the norms of marriage and motherhood. They ditch their safe relationships, or carry on brazen affairs; they fear pregnancy, or seek it out on their own terms. The feminist messages are never strident because they are couched in such brisk, tongue-in-cheek narratives. For instance, in "Christmas Jezebels" three sisters in 4th-century Lycia cleverly resist their father's attempts to press them into prostitution and are saved by the bishop's financial intervention; in "Escape Clauses" a middle-aged woman faces the death penalty for her supposed crimes of gardening naked and picnicking on private property, while her rapist gets just three months in prison because she was "asking for it." (Nearly three decades on, it's still so timely it hurts.) I loved "The Bed," a kind of fairy tale about a luxurious new bed solving all of a woman's problems; "What Are Neighbours For," in which each woman cattily plans what she can get out of the others; "Labour," a brief five-act play set in a hospital delivery room; and "Zoë and the Pedagogues," about a woman learning to drive who has two very different teachers (perhaps inevitably, this recalled for me Mirror, Shoulder, Signal by Dorthe Nors). "An Interesting Condition," which takes place in an antenatal class, is like Curtis Sittenfeld's "Bad Latch," while multiple stories reminded me of Shena Mackay, especially "Send One Up for Me," about a woman tiptoeing around her boarding house and trying not to anger the landlady. Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-08-26 00:00:00 Amber Kurash These short blasts of spiky black humour leave you breathless. The petty-bourgeois milieu often reminded me of VS Pritchett, updated to the 1980s, and the sly social observation of a cruder 20th-century version of Jane Austen, keenly people-watching from a corner of the room. There are some killer first sentences here. Mrs Brumfitt crossed the room sideways and at speed, making for the comparative obscurity of the corner chair. She was tree-limbed, with beetling unplucked eyebrows that gave her a false scowl. (how VS Pritchett is that?) "Think of your cervix as the sleeve of a sweater," said the snake-hipped young midwife. And other sentences that are pure genius. A character about to read from the Bible: She sat up straight and formalised her face so that her mouth was stern and her cast-down eyelids gleamed like the backs of teaspoons. Entertaning, and sometimes a bit depressing given her jaundiced view of male-female relationships. For maximum enjoyment, best taken in small doses.