Author Archive: Lesley Jakobsen
Headlong
Bruegel the Elder, Winter Landscape with skaters and bird trap
(by Michael Frayn) What would you do if you were certain that you had discovered a work of art not so much lost as mythical? A painting beyond value which is being used by rich rural idiots to block the fireplace. Horrible, unhinged, feckless Martin Clay makes that decision instantaneously in Michael Frayn’s Headlong. and then dithers about it until the reader wants to cry. This is a marvellous, unusual and comic book with some weaknesses – for one, the reader will learn more than s/he need ever know about Breugels both with and without “h”s, elder and younger and the bitter relationship between the Netherlands…
Continue Reading →Saved Cats
Top Cat
Out of the caged room wandered a tiny ginger kitten and nuzzled P’s leg. “He has made his choice.” The inside of his bat ears were green from microchip dye. He howled in his box on the passenger seat all the way home. He reprises this Allen Ginsburg-sized howl, learnt from early on, when he wants to eat or go outside. We called him ‘Miron’ after Sean Micallef’s accident-prone, French plasticine figure, a terrific parody of the old ‘Red and Blue’ euro-trash TV show. We were then living in a rented, rambling pile on the side of a hill and Miron often disappeared…
Continue Reading →The Evil Eye
Blood-and-Guts-Oates Image by Larry D Moore CC A-SA 4.0
(by Joyce Carol Oates) Joyce Carol Oates confounds me. Why is it that she is right up there in the pantheon of Writers-I-Want-To-Be, while I so often find her writing lacklustre? Why does she write so much? Why does she persist in the annoying over-use of italics to emphasise? Why does she use her full, unwieldy name? Is there a “Joyce Oates” out there writing “blood-and-guts” fiction? Perhaps the answer to all of my JCO-related questions is that she needs an editor who will tell her the truth. These four novellas are examples of work which is good but not good enough. The common factor is…
Continue Reading →Shop Til You Drop
If Shop Til You Drop were a woman, her name would be Symantha. Symantha is a nail technician but she’s trying out for “Australian Idol” and her friends say she’ll win. Symantha’s living with her boyfriend but she’s ditching him soon and her friends say she should. Symantha’s friends LOVE her selfies and say she should try modelling. Once upon a time, I woke like Sleeping Beauty from a years-long coma during which I had worn the same out-dated princess outfit. I swept out into an unknown world (known as “The Newsagents”) and saw Shop Til You Drop. I thought it was a…
Continue Reading →In Style (Australia)
If the Australian edition of In Style were a woman, her name would be Alyssä and she would be the PA to the CEO of an interior design firm whom she hopes to marry when his wife gives up on the botox. Alyssä would wear Armani culottes to theatre first nights. She wouldn’t think much of you. The Good: In Style is much more likeable than Alyssä, its corporal manifestation. It is a truly terrific and selective catalogue of upper-mid-market fashions, arranged into useful categories. It does an admirable job of showing how to style and combine these expensive things. It shows you clearly who has…
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