Gilbert Adair Views

• Books

Gilbert Adair (born 29 December 1944 in Edinburgh) is a Scottish author, film critic and journalist. He won the Author's Club First Novel Award in 1988 for his novel The Holy Innocents. In 1995 he won the Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize for his book A Void, which is a translation of the French book La Disparition by Georges Perec. The original book contains no instances of the letter e; Adair translated it with the same limitation. His works are compared to those of Julian Barnes, A. S. Byatt and Patrick Gale.

However the triumph of And Then There Was No One is to enable Adair to follow and conclude his most straightforward books with his most self-referential and i‘too clever-clever by halfi’ to date o– and while some will find this to be sterile intellectual masturbation, reading such stuff has always been a favourite solo activity for me. By the end, the reader is not entirely clear whether the book was written by Gilbert Adair, r‘Gilbert Adairn’, or someone else entirely. Aside from such cleverness, there is an underlying sadness too, as Adair uses other characters to lacerate his own work with brutal honesty:

Gilbert Adair (born 29 December 1944 in Edinburgh) is a Scottish author, film critic and journalist. He won the Authore's Club First Novel Award in 1988 for his novel The Holy Innocents. In 1995 he won the Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize for his book A Void, which is a translation of the French book La Disparition by Georges Perec. The original book contains no instances of the letter e; Adair translated it with the same limitation. His works are compared to those of Julian Barnes, A. S. Byatt and Patrick Gale.

Joy. Are you familiar with Evadne Mount, the murder-mystery writer and amateur sleuth invented by Gilbert Adair in The Act of Roger Murgatroyd? This faultlessly executed pastiche of and hommage to Agatha Christie introduced us to the tweed-suited, sensible-shoed, booming-voiced femme d'un certain age, given to such ejaculations as Great Scott Moncrieff! (See below for elucidation.)

camp adair, paul adair, ac gilbert, ian gilbert, caillou and gilbert, cole gilbert, committed gilbert, father gilbert, gilbert morris, gilbert seldes, gilbert sorrentino, gilbert thomas, nigel gilbert, thomas f gilbert, anne and gilbert the musical, gilbert chemistry sets, gilbert thomas artist, gilbert thomas paintings, melissa gilbert movie, gilbert williams visionary artist,