Sarah Wheeler
A Pistol, a Bible and A Thousand Fur Seals
Selkirk's Island
By Diana Southami
Weidenfield & Nicolson 246pp £14.99
Few stories exert a more universal appeal than that of the castaway. Each generation returns greedily to the theme: last summer a television docusoap, more recently the Oscar–nominated Tom Hanks biopic. Now, in this stylish and engaging work of narrative history, Diana Souhami takes the most influential castaway of all time and frames his adventure within the story of a small archipelago in the Pacific Ocean. It is an account of isolation and claustrophobia, of swashbuckling adventure and spiritual tranquility; and of the myth, rather than the reality, of redemption.
Six hundred miles off the coast of Chile, the Juan Fernandez Islands were briefly colonised by Spaniards in the 1590s. Apart from that unsuccessful interlude, for much of their history they remained an uninhabited place, fecund and dense with ferns. Lured by the gleam of gold up and down the
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Paul Gauguin kept house with a teenage ‘wife’ in French Polynesia, islands whose culture he is often accused of ransacking for his art.
@StephenSmithWDS asks if Gauguin is still worth looking at.
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‘I have fond memories of discussing Lorca and the state of Andalusian theatre with Antonio Banderas as Lauren Bacall sat on the dressing-room couch.’
@henryhitchings on Simon Russell Beale.
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We are saddened to hear of the death of Fredric Jameson.
Here, from 1983, is Terry Eagleton’s review of The Political Unconscious.
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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