Richard Davenport-Hines
European Son
It is puzzling that David Pryce-Jones’s memoirs have not found an English publisher and have been limited to a paperback edition issued by an American magazine. Perhaps they seemed too privileged for these populist days. The oddity and poignancy of his story, the spry elegance of his prose, the angular and implacable cleverness of his ideas and the brusque Etonian confidence of his dealings with people make for a strange and haunting book.
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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