Category Archive: WRITING & LITERATURE
The Geography of Bliss
It won't be long
(Eric Weiner) This is another of those sorts of books which are labelled “holiday” or “beach” reads but for once, it really might be worthwhile to read at 30,000 feet while jetting in to meet some joyful Icelanders (by far the best chapter in the book) or away from the moaning Moldovans (who, TVC is surprised to note, don’t even seem to be cheered by their relative success at Eurovision). Is Bhutan really the happiest country in the world? Despite its telegenic crinkle-faced monks, its measure of Gross National Happiness and its being the site of Shangri-La (which was, interestingly enough, the former name…
Continue Reading →The Waiting Years
In Japan - beware the black butterfly
(Fumiko Enchi) Although the story commences in the household of Kin and her crippled daughter Toshi, it quickly turns to the bifurcated life of Tomo, the middle-aged wife of an older, important bureaucrat. Tomo, despite her “unbending quality” and “undeniable air of distinction” lives an agony of repressed jealousy and humiliation. Although she can barely read and is a voteless subject in her samurai husband’s kingdom, Tomo manages the family’s extensive finances and murderously complex emotional structures with dedication and skill. Her husband, Yukitomo, is a suave and easy seducer of the disenfranchised women about him who have nowhere else…
Continue Reading →Essence of Dick
"Let Me Make Something Perfectly Clear" (1970 photo of Nixon by Jack E Kightlinger)
“A place in the national firmament… Greatness is more than government. To make exciting mischief or dull salt; Hazard the chance of ruin, lay on fault, Set the highest stakes through piracy But who the hell to handle it, to cut free; To build me a mad image, up to anything Other than domestically, one who’ll thus bring A welcome beard. Under my dark sun, hold hard! The one you serve was dealt the bleakest card.” (What serves power, if one’s form at flood Is splendidly bedight yet daubed with mud? And the ‘new King’…
Continue Reading →The Blue Flower
(Penelope Fitzgerald) I thought that Penelope Fitzgerald’s novalised (geddit?) part-biography of the poet and philosopher Novalis would help me straighten out the Penelopes Lively and Fitzgerald and stop me from confusing Novalis and Nerval. Of course Lively and Fitzgerald are virtually indistinguishable, both being women who have won the Booker Prize. By an incredible coincidence, each is English and has one “e” in her surname. It is also easy to see how I have confused the two male writers – after all, Gerard de Nerval was the pseudonym of Gerard Labrunie who took his lobster Thibault for walks about bits of France while Novalis was the…
Continue Reading →Dominion
'Non preoccuparti, we left Winston in the car.' (Chamberlain, Mussolini, Lord Halifax & Count Ciano at Rome Opera, Jan. 1939)
(C J Sansom) Smog, smog smog. There is a lot of smog in this novel, which serves to hide the holes in this rather unlikely plot. But it’s an ok read if you believe in “holiday” books. World War I is known only as The Great War because there was no World War II. Halifax succeeded Chamberlain. England surrendered and Churchill is now an underground resistance leader. How differently things actually turned out! It’s all very well until the erstwhile surprisingly amiable and hands-off Nazis turn a bit nasty and start to disappear people. Importantly however, Germany’s most effective means of domination is to control Europe with finance rather than jackboots. How…
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