Category Archive: Fiction
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 →Lucky Jim
From the not-so-merrie film
(by Kingsley Amis) (1954) Grand-daddy of English campus novels, a funny yet serious tale of angry young man Jim Dixon who rebels yet wants in; despises and embraces the bourgeois groves of academe and despite some hilariously bad behaviour, flourishes. Sex and alcohol are pursued with as much fervour as learning: it was ever thus, we suppose. But you haven’t lived till you follow the account of Jim’s keynote lecture on “Merrie England”
Continue Reading →Old School
Image by W. A. Fraser, 1901
(by Tobias Wolff) Imagine! A school of boys whose role models are writers! Where is this youthful intellectual paradise? Somewhere in the USA of the 1960s. But beware, boys. Literature is a wolf and your morals are its prey.
Continue Reading →The Earthquake in Chile
Apart from Japan, Chile is Earthquake Central. The main picture accompanying this post (by Carlos Varela) shows accumulated rubble about the Museum of Contemporary Art in Santiago in 2010. There was another big bad quake yesterday, reportedly one of a recent series, and one of increased magnitude. It is hard to imagine the experience of an earthquake, along with its equally dangerous sequelae, such as tsunamis, fires, disease and so on. To get a taste, in safety, read the superb short story by Heinrich von Kleist, The Earthquake in Chile (1807), an account that while fictional, is so rich in nuance and matter-of-facts that it amounts…
Continue Reading →The Seed Collectors
Walking Palm photo by JimfBleak
(by Scarlett Thomas). Copy the Gardener “Family Tree” at the opening of this novel and keep it close at hand. Perhaps you will be more successful than I at keeping the characters apart, remembering who is married to whom, who is whose brother and whether or not this sweaty encounter is adultery. The characters all seem to have the same name and hip “lifestyle”. The confusion is confounded by the chop-change style – in case the reader is not confused enough, incomplete passages of pop-psychology, dialogue and cogitation are interlarded without attribution. Is it Oleander, Clem, Charlie, Ollie, Bryony, Holly, Ash, Pi, Fleur, Skye or Pondscum this time? Bryony’s drunken shopping and eating…
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