“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, […]
“If the general climate is bad, all will be affected by it. Men and women of letters are not expected to do more than they can, as they express this bad situation in their literary production. With respect to the question of the appeal of a particular work, the whole thing depends on whether the […]
I know it’s a somewhat limited demographic, but if you’ve had a prefrontal lobotomy during the past few weeks, finding appropriate Christmas TV fare can be a challenge. You want something light, so as not to distract you from the absorbing task of managing your drool. Well, RTE has just the programme for you–Celebrity Jigs […]
James Meek‘s third novel, The People’s Act of Love is set in a small town in Siberia in 1919, during the Russian civil war. The characters and drama, though, are far removed from the stock literary gallery of reds and whites. Amongst his drammatis personae are Christian castrates, cannibals and a division of the Czech […]
