Archive for Reading
Solar Bones by Mike McCormack
It is an experimental novel and it isn’t exactly a realist novel but there is such an inevitability to the prose, structure and story that it defies labels such as these. Just as if I had turned on my music, ‘Solar Bones’ by Mike McCormack jolted me straight into its world and held me there […]
I’ve just finished ‘Before the Fall’ by Juliet West
I’ve had to double-check myself whilst I’ve been reading this book because one sunny day I found myself shouting at my family: “Fetch the fly spray! We don’t want no flies in here.” They gave me those long frowns – what’s she playing at now, laughed to each other and of course, carried on with […]
Half Blood Blues – Esi Edugyan
Edugyan’s second novel is not only a gripping page-turner but beautifully written. Narrated by Sid Griffiths, a Baltimore jazz musician living in Nazi Berlin in 1939, the voice thrums like his deep string bass in flawless syncopated rhythms. The novel begins in Paris in 1940. Listen to the sound of Edugyan’s language as Sid describes a […]
St Petersburg – city of stories
I have just returned from chilly St Petersburg with its frozen canals, brilliant sunshine, sudden snowstorms, and the vast Neva River. I’ve always wanted to visit partly because I am fascinated by Russian history but mostly because I’ve always loved Russian literature and music. I’m thinking here of Dostoyevsky, Chekov, Tolstoy , Turgenev, Nabokov, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Bulgakov, Shostakovich, […]
Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
There Once Was a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbour’s Baby This is a marvellous collection of short stories by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya. To find out my reaction to these surreal fables, read my article on the experience below: From the moment I began the first story, I was compelled to read with the same […]
Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
I’ve just finished – There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbour’s Baby From the moment I began the first story, I was compelled to read with the same desperate energy that drives Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s characters to survive. These are fantastical stories, apocalyptic urban folk tales, sinister, surreal. This is optimism in […]
I’ve just finished…The Mayor of Casterbridge
The Dorset landscape has a mystical and deeply private beauty; there is a sense that things are going on, and have been doing so for many centuries, hidden things that are too private to talk about. Hardy evokes this in his writing. I’ve just finished reading The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy. Casterbridge is, of […]
Gold Boy, Emerald Girl – a quiet voice talking
Li’s stories tell of a China emerging into the 21st century. Her characters are fascinating and the stories are a captivating window into day to day life in China. If you are interested in the details of how people have survived all these years in the People’s Republic before the social and economic reform of […]
