Gods of human folly
Today, the very mention of the word myth raises eyebrows of incredulity at best, or provokes reactions of mild or not so mild dismissal from those whose truculent rational mind is the unfailing compass of their souls and everyday lives. A myth is to most people today a synonym for lies, fabrications, fairy tales and...
Fleet of word and deed
We know perhaps too much about Paul Morand, and certainly too little. Distillations of his being, his writer’s essence and his place in history most often focus on his celebrated friendships with Chanel and Proust, his occasionally bombastic, somewhat affected and at times self-glorifying public persona, his casual intolerance of much that did not conform...
A monumental construction
Maylis de Kerangal’s Birth of a Bridge by is a strikingly original contemporary myth and a thrilling investigation of post-modernity. The story is simple, absorbingly technical, full of tactile details and well-grounded practicalities. In a realistically imaginary city in California called Coca, a powerful mayor who has climbed to the summit of success from the...
Experience at full tilt
There is deep lush green in the landscape of Texas: The Great Theft; the white of oblivion, of a nebulous, pale and ghostly existence; and the scarlet red of bloodshed. This is a towering, brutally honest book by a quietly strong woman, a brilliant wordsmith and master storyteller. It is full of characters with significant...
The world’s pendulum is Antigone’s heart
Ivo van Hove’s production of Antigone at the Barbican reminds us of what theatre is all about. Why tragedy and the Greeks are still crucial to our understanding of our humanity and inhumanity, why they still present us with a timeless meaning, an ethics of eternity. Ivo van Hove has given us a haunting, eerie...
War stories for children
“Maybe humans aren’t such a terrible animal after all,” reflects a whale that daydreams about aeroplanes in the sky and fatefully falls in love with a Japanese submarine. As the whale insouciantly navigates the sardine-filled waters of nature, the human sea-routes of warships and submarines and the airways of military planes are rife with death...
Never forget to remember
Roger Cohen’s The Girl from Human Street: Ghosts of Memory in a Jewish Family is a truly haunting, vibrant, unusual and staunchly poignant gentle book. It is in fact not one, but many books: a lingering, evocative memoir, a gripping narrative, a shrewd socioeconomic history of South Africa, Britain, Israel, the US and Eastern Europe,...
Quality of mercy strain’d
The Merchant of Venice is one of the most poignantly tragic, most unassailably human literary works ever created. If it were to be lost or disappear, much of what makes life worth living would be lost with it. It vitally seeks to express what makes human existence and human society possible – and to expose...
Children’s books for all ages
Here’s a selection of children’s favourites to be cherished across the generations, a compendium of winged words and enchanted images by endlessly inventive authors and illustrators. Mostly published (or reissued) over the past year, new characters rub shoulders with old and voices combine in captivating harmony, jostling for space on bookshelves, coffee or breakfast tables...
The power of leaves
We live in an age of speed, expedience, brief thoughts and long illusions; we relish fast images, swift exchanges of truncated words, and hurried displacement; we rejoice in monumental structures, ideas, endeavours. News, whether of catastrophe or joy, races through our minds or past our eyes like flashes of lightning; we claim to experience life...
Dangerous for ordinary people
It takes great determination and mettle to give voice to silence; to look at closely, and truly see what has become invisible or been reduced to transparency. Louisa Treger evinces both purpose and mettle, deep knowledge and fine understanding in The Lodger, her debut novel about the writer Dorothy Richardson, someone who is often overlooked...
Elena Ferrante’s shadow lives
Elena Ferrante writes beautifully. She writes honestly, powerfully, with directness and unflinching immediacy. In My Brilliant Friend and The Story of a New Name, the first two of her Neapolitan novels, she writes about a world which no longer belongs to what we might call our ‘reality’; the world of the fifties and sixties, of...
