Ophelia Field
Ecology and Existence
Get A Life is not about one life but four: it examines two marriages in South Africa, that of an ecologist named Paul and his wife Benni/Berenice (alternating names for the alternate ways in which she is viewed from one sentence to the next) and that of Paul’s parents, Lyndsay and Adrian.
In his thirties, Paul discovers he has thyroid cancer and may die. It says everything about Gordimer’s talent that the scene in which this news is delivered is so throat-tighteningly sad even within the first ten pages of the book. Paul’s treatment is discovered to require doses of radioactive iodine,
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
'Foreign-policy pundits, then as now, tended to lack subtlety, even if they could be highly articulate about a nation they did not like very much.'
Read Lucy Wooding's review of Clare Jackson's 'Devil-Land', which has won the @WolfsonHistory prize.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-view-from-across-the-channel
From the First World War to Evelyn Waugh: @DaisyfDunn takes us into the world of Oxford between the wars.
Generously supported by @Lit_Review
#CVHF #AmazingHistory #UniversityofOxford
'That they signify something is not in question. Yet how to interpret the symbols of a long-vanished society? What would the inhabitants of the 50th century make of the ubiquity of crosses in Europe?'
Hilary Davies on the art of the Lascaux caves.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/poems-of-the-underground