Tag: fiction

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Imaginations: Connections between real life and art

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This is the amazing memoir of one of the greatest storytellers of our time, over six decades of writing, from 1961 onwards, with her towering influence, who wrote New York Times bestseller’s and modern classics like The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), or The Testaments or Alias Grace (1996) are a reproach to the Swedish Academy. In 1939, with a world war under way, born in Ottawa and raised by ruggedly independent, scientifically minded parents- Carl, an entomologist father, and Margaret Dorothy, a former nutritionist mother. She and her siblings were taken by their mother to throw tin cans at a large … Continue reading Imaginations: Connections between real life and art

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Restoration or Erasure: Old ways are erased by the new

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The Palace of the Republic, that once housed the East German Parliament, is demolished. A grandmother’s laughter passes from life into memory and the furniture that once made a home is taken to the tip. A friendship drops into silence. Old ways are erased by the new  In this fascinating collection of essays, most of them written for her column in the Frankfurter  Allgemeine Zeitung, Winner of the International Booker Prize Jenny Erpenbeck meditates, with a sense of both deep melancholy and wry humour, on the disappearance and impermanence of things. Recalling the shop that used to darn tights in the … Continue reading Restoration or Erasure: Old ways are erased by the new

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Love Triangle

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Lily King’s understands good love stories- their secrets and subtext, their highs and their free falls, suffused with love triangles that even the narrator’s 12-year-old son at some point tells her that he has been invited to be part of a thruple which he declines. His mother, the narrator whose name we are not told until the final lines of the book. In the fall of her senior year of college. She meets two students from her 17th century Lit class: Sam who had coppery brown hair and Yash with a thick black pontytail. Best Friends living off-campus in the elegant … Continue reading Love Triangle

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Do You want to be a filmmaker

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BECOMING A FILMMAKER – THE HARD TRUTH ABOUT MAKING ITIN LONDON By Krish Pinto – London BA Film Graduate. Book available to order on Amazon.It is rare to find a writer with the talent of chronicling a guide andcommentary so successfully and imaginatively as Krish Pinto. Thatknown, I have suggested to him that he might be good writing novelsand maybe a screenplay to go with each one. Krish reacted bystating that AI is ahead of us writers – and can be programmed towrite novels and screenplays for us! However, I thought of this overtwenty five years ago regarding a novelist … Continue reading Do You want to be a filmmaker

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Lyra’s fate…

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Philip Pullman’s use of language of fantasy to illuminate our world and to explore the deepest question of what it means to be alive and awake to all the splendors and horrors around us.  In volume one his follow up triology which referenced John Milton’s Paradise Lost. The next volume depict Lyra at 20, battling anti-liberal forces, and the final volume published this week, those forces are confirmed to be multinational conglomerates that overdevelop erstwhile wholesome communities and even threaten to buy naming rights to Oxford colleges. Lyra Silvertongue was new Eve, Her “Fall” into sin reframed as a victory … Continue reading Lyra’s fate…

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How we end up saying things that relate to an idea rather than experience

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An unnamed 40-year-old, Protagonist writer of Big Kiss, Bye-Bye, who grew up in the South West of England before moving to Ireland, struggle to explain to her lover why she can’t explain how she feels: “ Somethings are resistant to words maybe, and when you start trying to apply them you end up with something else, another thing a theory, I suppose” Claire-Louise Bennett clarify – how easily language falls into pre-formulated phrases that fail to capture our intended meaning- how we “end up saying things that relate to an idea, rather than to the experience itself”. The protagonist’s unorthodox … Continue reading How we end up saying things that relate to an idea rather than experience

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Don’t give the customer what they want, give them what they don’t know they want yet

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Gene Pressman’s memoir of his time working for the legendary New York Department store Barneys founded by his grandfather, comes when the authors helps open its vast new outpost on Madison Avenue in 1993. The luxury store, complete with mosaic floors, custom-made furniture, saltwater fish tanks, a restaurant and floors of beauty, jewellery and clothes. Pressman writes “ The store is amazing. It’s hard to be humble knowing stores just didn’t look like this – not anymore”. Barney’s had, he says, “gone back to the past to the grand  department stores just didn’t look like this – not anymore. Barney’s had … Continue reading Don’t give the customer what they want, give them what they don’t know they want yet

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Abandoned by fathers, betrayed by lovers

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Braithwaite’s Cursed Daughters is about intergenerational trauma and female kinship. The Falodun family have been cursed for generations, since an ancestor’s affair with a married man provoked the vengeful wife to declare that the woman and her female descendants would never prosper in love: “men will be like water in their palms.”   Setting her story between 1994 and the present day, Braithwaite braids together the fates of three women bound by the curse. A young woman must shake off a family curse, and widely held belief that she is the reincarnation of her dead cousin in this wickedly funny, brilliantly perceptive … Continue reading Abandoned by fathers, betrayed by lovers

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Know your hatred and envy to avoid self-deceptions for successful intimacy

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Love’s Labour is a collection of psychoanalysis case studies, is long awaited follow-up of American-born, London-based, Stephen Grosz’s bestselling debut of 2013, The Examined Life,  a series of slender psychoanalytic case histories, which opened the world of the consulting room with vividness.  In Love’s Labour, Grosz, gives us insight into the twists and turns of the patient’s inner lives. The woman who is horrified to find her husband having an affair eventually turns out to have a secret gladness: It’s a get-out-of-jail free card she can now legitimately divorce. After deeper exploration, these patients turn out to be Russian dolls, with … Continue reading Know your hatred and envy to avoid self-deceptions for successful intimacy

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Life outside a rigid hierarchy, amid tradition and modernity

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Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Her previous novels Hullaballoo in the Guava Orchard (1998), set in India of her childhood- born in Delhi, The Inheritance of Loss which won the 2006 Booker Prize.  This tale is about Sonia Shah and Sunny Bhatia, whose once-wealthy families connected through their grandparents, are part of the first generation of young Indians to experience migration, travel and life outside a rigid hierarchy, caught in between tradition and modernity, between pleasing parents and pleasing themselves. They fall in love, but are soon parted by self-doubt, pride … Continue reading Life outside a rigid hierarchy, amid tradition and modernity