Gillian Slovo
A Voice Unchained
There’s a passage in André Brink’s latest, Booker longlisted novel that summons back his 1982 A Chain of Voices. The similarities between the two were already evident: both books are set in the dying days of slavery and both explore the violent interactions between master and slave. But the connection is directly drawn when the new book’s namesake, the knitting slave Philida, is taken by her master to see the desiccated skull of a former slave, Galant, whose 1825 rebellion is the subject of A Chain of Voices.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
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