Must You Go? (Antonia Fraser)
Nymphaea Black Princess Water Lily
One half of the TVC team considers published diaries and collections of letters to be a lazy form of memoir. This review is written by that half. In the opinion of this half, plodding through a (probably) heavily edited and unsynthesised lot of journal entries or epistles is an unedifying and disjointed experience. And so it is with “Must You Go?“, Lady Antonia Fraser’s annotated diary of her time with the late Harold Pinter – who, as a playwright was master of the notorious, enigmatic pause. Pinter was also an actor and political activist, particularly in the causes of the Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia…
Continue Reading →7 Academy Award Outfits – the Good, the Bad and the Ugggghhhh
Have people learnt since the 2016 Golden Globes? Here are TVCs seven notable red carpet outfits from this year’s Oscars. The Good… The Bad… The Lovely…. and the Ugggghhhh…
Continue Reading →Hannah Gadsby
Hannah in 'The NGV Story' (ABC) considers the work of Mueck
(Adelaide Fringe Festival, Garden of Unearthly delights, 28 February 2016) It’s the Fringe and you gotta go to something, unless you’re saving those pennies for the stock car race Adelaide puts on to insinuate that it hosts great races and makes great cars (implications no longer true, if they ever were). The Varnished Culture naturally plumped for Hannah, art historian and well known actress and comic. She tends to steer clear of gynie jokes and deploy real wit, a rather radical departure. She is also excellent in a sweet ABC show, Please Like Me. We lined up (with our pre-paid tickets)…
Continue Reading →Nyugalom
"The Chasseur in the Forest", Caspar David Friedrich, 1814 (detail)
[A lunatic from the past, Bela Kiss, living in conditions of relative tranquility (in Hungarian, “Nyugalom“), made recordings of his ravings in the first-person mode obtaining from time immemorial. These have been transcribed and lovingly italicized by a team of scholars with rather too much affection for the source. The editor has taken the liberty of suggesting that the ensuing statements in the manuscript smack of self-serving apologia, akin to the homilies obtaining in the forwards of most modern three-volume biographies, to the effect that guessing, decontextualizing, moralizing and or fiction are necessary in order to render an antique subject…
Continue Reading →The Life of Elves (Muriel Barbery)
Horse or boar?
Although a book should not be judged by its cover, we at TVC assert that it can be judged by its title, at least prima facie, unless and until evidence to the contrary is provided. (TVC declined to read The Elegance of the Hedgehog because of our aversion to eye-catching, cutesy titles. How can a novel with such a title, more than 6 million sales and a plot concerning a wise concierge and a suicidal teen be anything but “young adult” pulp?) The advance notices, however, about Muriel Barbery’s third novel, The Life of Elves were promising. It had a less try-hard title, good reviews and no sales at all…
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