Being a Girl You’ve seen the film: a man looks behind an office filing cabinet to find a portal into another man’s consciousness – someone who turns out to be a famous actor. The intruder remains inside this other life for a quarter of an hour or so before being ejected onto the side of […]
In his 1921 “Manifesto on the Immediate Futurisation of Life” Bruno Jasieński called for Poland’s national poets – “the stale mummies of mickiewiczes and słowackis” – to make way from the “plazas, squares and streets” for the new: Futurists like himself. Many years later, as Soren Gauger tells us in the afterword to this excellent […]
“A poem often has a moment or a movement or an image, to deal with, not a whole series or interrelated and elaborated sequences, nor that sense of duration and vicarious experience that the novel brings. The best a novel can do is use its superstructure, all those cumulative bits of housekeeping, to achieve poem-moments, […]
I have always had a morbid attraction to psychologically unstable characters- a penchant which I guess says more about me than the author/character in question, however, I can’t help wondering what it is that keeps us interested in the insane. It’s probably the mystery or the idea that there must be a kind of cipher […]
There’s a moment, about 80 pages into Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, when what appears to be a reasonably conventional novel takes a disorientating twist (an anecdote about a visit to a Swiss mental asylum), before returning on track. Thereafter, throughout that lengthy novel gaps continously appear where it seems that if you but scratch the realism […]
The publication of Umberto Eco’s latest novel (in Italian), Il cimitero di Praga(The Cemetery of Prague), has created no small amount of controversy in Italy, thanks largely to very public criticisms voiced by the Vatican backed Osservatore Romano newspaper, and the Chief Rabbi of Rome, Riccardo Di Segni . Eco, who made his literary debut […]
Reading through numerous reviews of Christos Tsiolkas’s novel The Slap helped me clarify why it’s such a particularly strong novel; not because they’re uniformly positive, but because almost all that I’ve read take a strong line on the book – I’ve yet to come across a review that didn’t engage wholeheartedly with the novel, which […]
One of the many startling things about José Saramago was that he was an overtly political writer in a literary world in which being political does not pay. Remarkably, at the age of 85 he began a highly controversial blog and these occasional pieces, collected in The Notebook (Verso, 2010) – squibs, memoranda, appreciations of […]
So, you want to write a thought-provoking novel about consciousness, death, fatherhood and the role of narrative in our lives? What’s the best way to do it? A stereotypical gothic mansion turned into a health clinic run by a mad scientist doesn’t sound like a promising start. A split universe setting whose hero is chick, […]
