Terry Eagleton has taken most conceivable opportunities to study Americans, not least his wife and three of his children. He has taught all over America in his travels as a visiting lecturer in English literature. And yet his observational powers have not benefited from his roving feet. He sheds little new light on that eternally […]
There is an old Chinese proverb which Marcello Di Cintio cites in this charming if somewhat melancholic book on the world’s unneighbourly habit of building walls to keep the ‘other’ out: ‘Everyone pushes a falling fence.’ True, the Berlin Wall did fall down eventually, but pretty much every other piece of passive-aggressive street furniture Di […]
Ambitious officials of the Victorian Raj aimed for postings in northern India, in Bengal, the Punjab and especially in what became known as the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh. A career in the hills and on the plains of Mughal India was considered more satisfying and invigorating than a life among the lagoons and […]
On 30 June 2012 Muhammad Morsi was inaugurated as president of Egypt. Although there was nothing especially remarkable about this colourless engineer turned party functionary, Morsi’s rise represented an extraordinary achievement for the Muslim Brotherhood, the organisation to which he had dedicated his life. Founded by a schoolteacher called Hasan al-Banna in 1928, the Brotherhood […]
I only met Kurt Vonnegut once, but his vivid, impish glance spoke volumes. He was a humane and shrewd character who held bold opinions that he expressed with humour and grace throughout his life. There was an antic quality in him that animates his best fiction, including his masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). That ironic, episodic, experimental, time-travelling […]
The grandest club in the world is undoubtedly the Roxburghe. Founded in 1812 and made up of 41 bibliophiles, many of whom own superb libraries, it numbers three dukes, two marquesses, three earls and a prince among its members, along with ten Deputy Lieutenants, six Fellows of the British Academy, two Privy Counsellors, a Knight […]
Mikhail Bulgakov, most readers and critics would concur, is the most widely loved and perhaps the greatest Russian writer in the Soviet period of fictional prose and drama. Some might be more deeply affected by Andrei Platonov’s harrowing prose, others impressed by the elegance of Vladimir Nabokov or the prophetic fantasy of Yevgeny Zamyatin, but […]
I am happily married, I have stepchildren, I live in a large house in Headington, I hate being Professor, I hate lecturing, I hate work, I see fewer people than I used to, I tick over, I go to the same place in the summer and the same place in the spring, and on the whole […]
Frankly, it was a triumph. Eight hundred people had gathered in the Barclays MegaCash Pavilion at the Hay Festival to hear me talk about my latest book. I was a little nervous, as I am accustomed to speaking to gatherings of about a tenth of that size. However, after a few minutes and a few […]
The Orchard of Lost Souls opens with a crowd scene. It is 21 October 1988, the 18th anniversary of the military coup in which Mohamed Siad Barre seized power in Somalia. The narrative follows three women: Kawsar, a widow in her late fifties, who is marshalled along with everyone else to attend the celebrations; Filsan, […]
In a short appreciation, published in 2004, Roberto Bolaño called the Argentinian novelist César Aira ‘one of the three or four best writers working in Spanish today’. Yet he found much about Aira and his work uncertain or difficult to believe. Born in 1949, Aira grew up in a town called Coronel Pringles, ‘which must’, […]
Jacqueline, a young Liberian woman, has found sanctuary on a Greek island. By day she walks the tourist-clogged beaches offering foot massages; by night she sleeps in a cave. She is plagued by constant nightmares of Charles Taylor’s brutal regime and its equally bloody downfall. She is safe, an escapee, a survivor, but she is […]
Villa Ada is a 450-acre park towards the north of Rome. Once the residence of the Italian royal family, it is now open to the public. But in Let the Games Begin, a megalomaniac businessman has bought the land and turned it into a safari park. Then he decides to hold the most spectacular housewarming […]
London-based author Ma Jian is not tarred by the same brush that paints mainland Chinese authors, such as the Nobel laureate Mo Yan, as compromised self-censors, afraid to call out the regime on its abuses of power. Rather, he is their strongest accuser. ‘Official Chinese writers’ are ‘locked in a beautiful cage’, he has said, […]
Until this year’s Champions League semifinal, Barcelona looked to have the system cracked. Press high, keep possession, pass, pass, pass. At times, it seemed, no one could touch them. Then better tactics, better players, better luck and even, perhaps, more desire, drove Bayern Munich to victory this May, as they beat Barcelona and went on […]
In his much-admired debut, American Rust, Philipp Meyer’s characters were casualties of the steel industry’s collapse in America’s northeast. Now he switches his attention to the southwest in a novel similarly drawn to decay, defeat and death – of Mexican rule, native American tribes, the Confederacy, the cattle trade – as the stories of three […]
Andreï Makine, born and brought up in Russia and one of his country’s greatest novelists, writes in French. Brief Lives that Live Forever reaches us in its crisp, elegant English version thanks to Geoffrey Strachan, who has translated all of Makine’s novels published in English to date. The Russian language is not quite absent: important […]
Anthea Nicholson’s The Banner of the Passing Clouds (Granta Books 289pp £14.99) follows the life of an eccentric recording artist living under the Soviet occupation of Georgia. He is born on the night of Stalin’s death (the fittingly ordered 5.3.1953) and christened with the latter’s original name (Iosif Dzhugashvili). Soon enough he becomes convinced that […]
In 1929, in the tiny town of West Table in the Missouri Ozarks, an explosion in the Arbor Dance Hall saw 42 people killed – ‘perished in an instant, waltzing couples murdered midstep, blown towards the clouds in a pink mist chased by towering flames’. What actually caused the explosion was never established. Myth has […]
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Interview with Iris Murdoch by John Haffenden via @Lit_Review
I love Helen Garner and this, by @chris_power in @Lit_Review, is excellent.
Yesterday was Fredric Jameson's 90th birthday.
This month's Archive newsletter includes Terry Eagleton on The Political Unconscious, and other pieces from our April 1983 issue.
Terry Eagleton - Supermarket of the Mind
Terry Eagleton: Supermarket of the Mind - The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act by Fredric Jameson
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