Amanda Craig
Gay Scenes
IN THESE WITHERINGLY funny, painfully acute stories about gay life, Michael Arditti shows himself to be of a different generation from writers such as Alan Hollinghurst and Philip Hensher: someone who was, from the evidence of these stories, too agonised to enjoy the hedonism of the pre-Aids gay scene in the 1980s, and whose sensibility makes him as much preoccupied with issues of class, art and emotion as with sex.
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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