Patricia Duncker
Body Blows
Neo-Victorian fiction delights in freaks, curiosities and the monstrous, as did the Victorians. Carol Birch’s new book, a biographical novel about Julia Pastrana, a genuine performing freak, self-consciously incorporates several common characteristics of contemporary neo-Victorian writing. The novel is ‘based on a true story’ and follows the high road of the historical record rather than burrowing into the suggestive gaps. Birch also employs a double narrative. Julia’s story begins in the 1850s with her debut on Broadway, while a parallel, modern narrative set in Thatcher’s England (remember her famous suggestion that we should all embrace Victorian values) opens in a household of marginal eccentrics and aged-hippy types living on society’s border.
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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