I’ve written in these pages many times about human rights violations in Uzbekistan. Free expression is severely restricted, thousands of people are imprisoned on politically motivated charges, human rights defenders and independent journalists are frequently subjected to harassment and intimidation, including beatings and smear campaigns, and torture is endemic. Uzbekistan’s authoritarian ruler Islam Karimov died […]
Those familiar with Graeme Macrae Burnet’s previous, Booker Prize-shortlisted novel, His Bloody Project, apparently a historical account of a real murder, will know of the author’s fondness for literary games. This, his third novel, also engages with the meanings of fiction, returning us to the provincial milieu of Saint Louis in France and the borderline […]
It is fifty years since the publication of Paul Theroux’s first novel, Waldo. Astonishingly prolific, he has published thirty further novels, plus almost twenty works of non-fiction, including a volume of criticism on V S Naipaul. Now aged seventy-six, he shows no signs of slowing down. At over 500 pages, his latest novel is a […]
At the end of Richard Flanagan’s new novel, the protagonist, a failed novelist called Kif Kehlmann, reflects that experience is the ‘most illusory of art’s myths, the nonsense that we must go beyond ourselves to discover the world’, when in fact ‘all the time it’s only by going within ourselves that we discover the truth […]
Flying to Chicago on her honeymoon, Eve Swift worries she’s made the wrong choice. Will the marriage work? Is Jim really the right husband for her? After all, he’s writing a book about the benefits of anxiety. The benefits! But it was anxiety that wrecked her budding acting career (‘It was all The Show Must […]
For the successful writer of fiction, there are few more insidious fears than the prospect of running out of material. Even the most indefatigable and prolific of storytellers may be haunted by the possibility that their flow of ideas might one day dry up, leaving them with nothing at all to say that they have […]
In a Britain of the near-future so saturated with surveillance that the government can literally plug itself into your mind, a woman called Diana Hunter is taken into custody. Her consciousness is accessed via a technology called Witness, designed to decant her thoughts and memories, thereby allowing the police to determine her level of guilt […]
What is Dust? Philip Pullman has been promising an answer to this question since the publication of the last volume of His Dark Materials, the trilogy of novels that took as one of its starting points Blake’s contention that in Paradise Lost the poet Milton was unknowingly of the devil’s party. We were told that […]
As Europe struggles to admit refugees from Syria, it is easy to forget that not long ago it was the citizens of the former Yugoslavia who were seeking asylum in western and northern Europe. Pajtim Statovci’s novel tells the story of two generations of Kosovan Albanians who have fled to Finland. Emine was born in […]
Javier Cercas is one of Europe’s most serious and attractive writers. Soldiers of Salamis, his breakthrough novel (published in English in 2003), dealt with an incident of mercy in the Spanish Civil War, The Speed of Light (2006) with the empty heart of a Vietnam War veteran, and Outlaws (2014) with a gang of thieves […]
Let’s begin by dispelling a misconception: in essence, László Krasznahorkai’s sentences aren’t long. While the use of the comma or coordinating conjunction in place of the full stop can imbue a writer’s words with a feeling of breathlessness or urgency (or, in the worst cases, of turgidity and torpor), in Krasznahorkai’s case it has little […]
We might turn, dear reader, to the fundamental paradox of the colour white. It is a blankness that is perceptible, a colour and also an absence of colour. It is symbolically associated with light, purity, innocence, perfection, marriage, birth and swaddling cloth, yet also with winding sheets, ice and snow, mute eternity, death, creepy marble and ghosts
‘Who dies, if memory lives?’ The well-known question has adorned many tombstones and always raises in me the dour response, ‘But who lives if memory dies?’ If our main hope of survival lies in the memories of the still living, then in two or three generations we shall all of us, as the Gospel of […]
Curiosity takes many forms. Although the author of this entertaining book – which is not so much a twin biography as a cultural companion to Restoration London – never quite acknowledges it, the curiosity of Samuel Pepys was of a rather different order to that of John Evelyn. While both were movers in the nascent […]
It’s one thing to pop over to a small British island for a spot of bird-watching or an adventure holiday – or, indeed, to gather material for an island-hopping book – but quite another to be fated to live there year-round. The inescapable truth, conceded here by Patrick Barkham and many before him, is that […]
In 1908 H G Wells published the very first work of fiction to anticipate that aircraft would play a major role in future conflicts. His novel The War in the Air depicted German airships terrorising American cities: ‘Nation rose against nation and air-fleet grappled air-fleet, cities blazed and men died in multitudes.’ No one described […]
Since the American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the strife emanating from the northwestern tribal areas of Pakistan has ensnared the attention of the international media. Pakistan has been portrayed as nothing more than a dismal arena of never-ending suicide bombings, drone strikes and sectarian attacks. The local population is presented as an abject and […]
Franklin Foer is a distinguished American journalist who has twice edited the venerable but perpetually broke liberal magazine the New Republic – once between 2006 and 2010, when he resigned, and then between 2012 and 2014, when he was enticed back by Chris Hughes, a young Facebook billionaire who had bought the publication
‘Dublin was never my Dublin,’ explains John Banville at the beginning of Time Pieces, which he calls a ‘quasi-memoir’. Born in Wexford, just a couple of hours south of the capital, he explains that ‘Dublin was for me what Moscow was for Irina in Chekhov’s Three Sisters, a place of magical promise towards which my […]
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'We may not be able to shield ourselves from irrational passions such as hatred, anger, envy, mockery and pride, or from the buffetings of circumstance, but we can rise above them by obtaining insight into their nature and their causes.'
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