D J Taylor
Facists on Film
At first glance, Michael Arditti’s new novel looks as if it belongs to that category of one-word abstract-noun titles pioneered by Ronald Firbank (Vainglory, Caprice, etc). In fact, ‘Unity’ turns out to refer not to some lofty dream of personal or communal alliance but to the Hon Unity Mitford, the fourth of Lord Redesdale’s six luminous daughters, who spent some years in Berlin as a Nazi groupie before shooting herself non-fatally in the head on the day that war was declared; returned to England by a solicitous Führer (Lord Redesdale insisted on paying his expenses), she survived a further nine years. Rather than merely recreating her life, Unity tells the story behind the making of an aborted biopic, shot on location in Germany and England forty years later, whose catastrophic consequences Arditti now attempts to unpick.
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
'The relish with which we made for beaches, hills and dales as soon as the most stringent restrictions were lifted suggests a widespread craving for contact with the natural world not met by a brief turn around the local park.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/those-dark-satanic-hills
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