Author Archive: Lesley Jakobsen
Giant
(by Edna Ferber) I’m going to the ACCC. I bought this novel expecting an “epic inter-generational family saga, sweeping across the vast Texan plains” as advertised. Instead I got a primer on the great state of Texas. The reader, personified by our delicate naïve Eastern bride Leslie asks the questions and her big bold Texian husband Bick, lord of the immense Reata ranch acreage answers: “‘Oh Jordan, I wish we could live up here in the mountains. I wish we could stay up here and Uncle Bawley could run Reata. Couldn’t he? Couldn’t he?’ ‘Get this, If you can understand anything that isn’t Virginia…
Continue Reading →Of Human Bondage
(By W. Somerset Maugham) (Dir. John Cromwell) (1934) Philip is a club-footed dill and Mildred is a troll. This book is a remarkably honest confession by Maugham (although he steadfastly denied it was autobiography). The teaming of Leslie Howard and Bette Davis in the film is apt but Bette’s role is overripe and unfortunately it shows. Then again, maybe that’s why WSM started batting for the other team.
Continue Reading →Eighteen Books You Should Read After You Die
Hell is other people's libraries
We are all familiar with the lists of ten, fifty, one hundred, one thousand and one “Books You Should Read Before You Die”. We at The Varnished Culture had not realised that it has been definitively proven that there is reading in the afterlife but, as it obviously has, we have compiled a list of books which absolutely must be read after death – i.e. not in this lifetime.:- The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt The Magicians by Lev Grossman Anything by Milan Kundera Wired by Bob Woodward Zeitoun by Dave Eggers The Kite Runner by…
Continue Reading →Memento Mori
(Giovanni Martinelli c. 1635)
(by Muriel Spark) Don’t let the question of who is making the famous “Remember you must die” phone calls distract you, o gentle reader, from the more important reflections on memory, sanity, guilt, narcissism and avarice raised in this searing novelette. Although under threat, a phalanx of elderly people simply up the ante and behave even more badly than they did in their (adulterous, manipulative, black-mailing) youth. There are amusing characters – a bellicose poet who gets into fisticuffs with a crippled but no less fearsome critic over the reputation of a dead poet – a would-be Margaret Mead of the geriatric who studies the elderly;…
Continue Reading →The Lost Landscape
(by Joyce Carol Oates). Joyce Oates wrote this:- “‘My sweet little blue-eyed girl,’ he said in a half-sung sigh that had nothing to do with [Connie’s] brown eyes but was taken up just the same by the vast sunlit reaches of the land behind him and on all sides of him – so much land that Connie had never seen before and did not recognize except to know that she was going to it.”* Surely one of the most chilling and sublime sentences in American fiction. So I pre-ordered the first volume of her memoirs (excluding “A Widow’s Story’) with alacrity and…
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