Pardon my enthusiasm but the master plotter and literary magician has done it again, delivered a thrilling page-turning, mind-bending masterpiece, a novella with all the punch and humanity of his 600-page blockbusters. Slade House is a compact 240 pages, a one-night-stand of a book but still inhabiting the multi-dimensional universe of his previous star turns,...
Christine Sneed’s latest novel Paris, He Said focuses on a woman in her early 30s who accepts the offer of an older man who invites her to live with him in the French capital and work as an artist. She writes from a luxurious and strings-free creative haven closer to home. October 2, 2015 Lake Forest, Illinois: I’m at Ragdale, an...
Vendela Vida’s latest novel The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty thrusts a nameless narrator into a maelstrom of mishaps in Morocco in which she loses her luggage, money and proof of identity and dives headlong into a random hiring as a cranky and needy Hollywood actress’s double. Her delirious dissembling is fuelled by a determined indifference...
Murders: forty-seven. Kidnappings: fourteen. Attempted rapes: five. Car chases: fourteen. Hijacks: two. Helicopter jumps: one. Smuggling expeditions: countless. It’s not exactly Sir Laurence Olivier. But in summing up my film career, mendacity will serve no one. I have acted in eleven films, three of which were shelved: two for financial reasons, the third as a...
Ann Goldstein, the English translator of Elena Ferrante, said in a panel discussion hosted by Rosie Goldsmith at Waterstones Piccadilly this month that she felt “bereft when the last translation was finished.” “The characters,” she felt, “become people we live with.” The same sense of bereavement, of loss of a vital friend or voice, is...
Marina Warner’s soaring new story collection Fly Away Home echoes with the author’s signature concerns about life’s mysteries, wonders and perplexities through myth, history and the present. Beginning with a tale you can read on these pages, I ask her about the gathering of these stories and their wider themes. MR: A version of the...
In those days the rumour started that there would be an inquiry. Full and frank disclosure, the government kept hinting. A tribunal of independent adjudicators and observers. Independent observers. They’d look into the events thoroughly. And into the sequence of events that led to them, into the decisions and actions that led to those particular...
Peter Swanson’s gripping new thriller The Kind Worth Killing, containing a satisfyingly twisted and murderous plot with nods to Patricia Highsmith, Agatha Christie and James M. Cain, has become an immediate bestseller and is shortlisted for the 2015 Ian Fleming Silver Dagger. He tells us about his influences and reading habits, and about delving into...
In a clip I never tire of watching, filmed on the Scandinavian leg of her 1976 tour, punk-rock legend Patti Smith takes perhaps the tamest song in the Velvet Underground’s repertoire and bawls it at us with a screech that is raw, ferocious, tortured. Her poet’s instincts turn Lou Reed’s bland line “lately you just...
As the BFI London Film Festival attracts the focus of the capital’s critics and movie buffs, and superstar actors crowd the red carpets, we spare a thought for the source novels, biographies and fables that inspired some of this year’s most anticipated main features – including a handful of remastered classics. Brooklyn Adapted by Nick...
There also seems to have been something about the wider context of the here and now that encouraged their work. “What was exciting for us all was that there was a growing momentum around the film when we started working on it, which ran parallel with global awareness and growing social activism highlighting the huge...
Patrick Marber’s Three Days in the Country at the National Theatre. “A ripe-soft pear” was Gustave Flaubert’s term of affection for his good friend Ivan Turgenev. Taken out of context, the term is hardly a compliment. Une poire molle is someone who lacks character, conviction, mettle; yet Flaubert must have meant something very different. According...
