John Dugdale
A Suitcase of Spiders
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE’S writing can be bewitchingly smart, funny and caustic, switching between acerbic satire, romping farce and note-perfect spoofing of American academia, media or corporate idiocy with dazzling facility. He may be ‘so modern he’s in a different time-space continuum from the rest of us’, as Zadie Smith proclaims; but his novels, The Broom of the System and Infinite jest, still accept such old-fashioned duties as entertaining the reader and creating memorable, more or less rounded characters.
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Perception is a weird thing. Lawrence Durrell saw Hydra as a ‘great horned toad’ but Henry Miller thought it resembled a ‘huge loaf of petrified bread’. Niko Ghika painted it as a series of neat white and orange squares.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-call-of-the-wine-dark-sea
The minimalist Fumio Sasaki 'confesses that as he began to purchase fewer consumer goods, his meals shrank in size. He decluttered and lost weight. Accumulation is not just an economic way of life but a form of embodiment too. Enlightenment is reduction.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/gardens-of-emptiness
'The river’s desecration mirrors Colombia’s long history of violence: "for years we treated it like a sewer," says Ahmed, a survivor of a particularly brutal paramilitary massacre, "just like we treated each other".'
Patrick Wilcken on the Magdalena.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/troubled-waters-3