Dead Man
(dir. Jim Jarmusch) (1996) Johnny Depp rides again, or should it be sails, into the sunset, only this time, weird works. [As Depp Indian films go, this is as good as The Lone Ranger is execrable…]
Continue Reading →The Count of Monte Cristo
(by Alexandre Dumas) A turgid but absorbing boys’- own revenge yarn.
Continue Reading →Clarissa
(by Samuel Richardson) (1748) The Varnished Culture mentions this merely to brag: longer than War and Peace (it’s the longest novel in English at approximately 984,870 words), this account of virtue chased and trashed is the novel’s version of continuous cricket: mad in detail, slow in execution, passionately related. Told in letters, very long letters, the correspondents spend what seems a year recalling a year but a crowded year. Take this book to a desert island; it will endure and also make a crackling blaze. Coleridge nailed Richardson’s “close, hot, day-dreamy continuity” and Priestley (in Literature and Western Man) commented:…
Continue Reading →A Confederacy of Dunces
(by John Kennedy Toole) Lovingly wry story of modern misanthrope, Ignatius J Reilly, a protean and monolithic loser who falls in love, sort of. “Oh, my God, their tongues are probably all over each other’s capped and rotting teeth”.
Continue Reading →Civilisation
(by Kenneth Clark) Really a compilation of scripts for a television series, this book, much ridiculed and parodied over the years (remember Monty Python’s “Are you civilised? Have you been civilised recently?”), is a wonderful, personal, informed view of humankind and culture from classical times to the then present (1968). Elegiac, nostalgic, pessimistic; almost everything in the arts since has borne out Clark’s view that “we can destroy ourselves by cynicism* and disillusion, just as effectively as bombs.” [* A cynic being a “man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.” – Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s…
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