Category Archive: WRITING & LITERATURE
Tender is the Night
"Hello, Mad Anthony Wayne" - William Adolphe Bouguereau, "The Wave" (1896)
(by F. Scott Fitzgerald) (1934) Scott and Zelda, Dick and Nicole – these tempestuous marriages merge in Fitzgerald’s most substantial novel, a complete rendering and realisation of the beautiful people of the cote d’azur between the wars. The author referred to the book as “a confession of faith” in a secular sense and there is a touch of Keats in his portrait of the ambitious Dr Diver and his doomed, chivalrous defiance of the rule against falling in love with your patient. Sheilah Graham justly described Tender as “sheer poetry all through, though the story is not so tightly knit as Gatsby.”*…
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…
Continue Reading →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 →The Road to Character
Hogarth's Character Caricatures
(By David Brooks) (2015) SBS Australia used to broadcast the Friday editions of Newshour on PBS (the American public broadcaster). That edition has a weekly political wrap-up, usually with Mark Shields and David Brooks. Whilst syndicated columnist Shields is the old-fashioned Big Democrat, Brooks takes on the aura of a Progressive Republican, less comfortable at the country club than, say, at a kaffeeklatsch. What makes their discussions valuable in particular to us (The Varnished Culture are hardly political scientists or well versed in the ins-and-outs of American politics and policy) is the refreshing and rare civility in their discourse; their mutual willingness to actually…
Continue Reading →Death in Venice
A template of death
(by Thomas Mann) (1912) (Dir. Luchino Visconti) (1971) Gustave von Aschenbach, an artist questing intensely after spiritual perfection, arrives, exhausted, unhappy, at the end of his tether, at the Lido and is entranced by a family staying at the same hotel, including handsome Tadzio in his little sailor suit. Shaken by his depth of feeling, Aschenbach attempts to skip town but upon a hitch in his arrangements, he decides to return to where he was smitten, and to embrace his doom with a light heart. Mann’s novella is a polished gem, a short and sweet epitome of a bitter quest to…
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