Real Life is Literature
Responding to the claim that writers today draw increasingly directly on their own lives, Jonathan Franzen argued that nobody ever wrote a more autobiographical story than Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis’: the most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention.
Little Women and their Pa
Louisa May Alcott’s father was a man of advanced views, a deist, vegan and ‘transcendentalist’. But, as is often the case with those of a theoretical and discursive bent, his practical abilities, as well as his appetite for the hard labour his utopian schemes required, were limited.
An Ornery Beast
Our world is organised by boundaries. Those people, those animals, that kind of weather, those diseases belong down there, not up here. But now these boundaries, from which our sense of who we are, individually and collectively, has been drawn, are beginning to look very porous.
From Head to Toe
We have all internalised vast quantities of popular culture and carry around long-term what was intended to passingly divert. The disposable has almost conquered the internal, and Conor Carville’s achievement is to show us this in poems that are by turns vivid, horrifying, clever, funny and visionary.
Hell-bent
Imagination is essential for human understanding and compassion. But in Hannah Arendt’s words, the human heart must go visiting, otherwise we lose our power to be moral. The ability to look at the world from another’s point of view in an imaginative way.
Waiting for Big Brother
Most biography of Orwell carries the assumption that his whole writing life was a preparation for his final work. This may well be so: the heroes and heroines of the earlier novels tend to be placed, alone or friendless, at the centre of a hostile world from which there is no escape.
Seeking Hardy’s Thrush
It was Thomas Hardy’s ‘darkling thrush’, who flung his soul upon the gloom of the dawning 20th century, that brought Seamus Heaney to Dorset as the 21st began. Heaney’s dedication to all the voices and languages of the archipelago may be an inspiration in the years ahead.
Enemies of the Nation
In late 19th century France, the propagandists of the far right warned that the nation faced a mortal enemy, a parasitical stranger who could not be assimilated. This was the Jew. Today the far right sees an almost identical foe, who is with us but not of us. This is the Muslim.
Through the Tarmac
In Deborah Levy’s new novel we are left with a sense of boundless complexity, the intertwining of present, future and past, of memory, dream and wish, hurt and desire, presence and absence, love and hate, and everything that slides between such simplifying distinctions.