Ophelia Field
Guilt & Culpability
As if to answer those who failed to see the preoccupations of her Booker Prize-nominated first novel, The Dark Room, as universal, rather than specifically German, Rachel Seiffert has returned to the same themes – culpability, guilt and accountability – in a second novel set largely in modern Britain.
The novel tells the love story of an ordinary young couple, Alice and Joseph, who discover parallels between themselves and Alice’s late grandmother and recently widowed grandfather, David. Joseph is traumatised by his experiences as a soldier in Northern Ireland during the final years of the Troubles, while David remains haunted by his part in the Emergency in colonial Kenya during the 1950s. As a result, the women who love these two men must tread the perimeters of conversational territory with caution, in case a buried memory turns out to be a landmine.
Seiffert’s novel is structurally brilliant. The slow-moving first half forces the reader into the position of a wife or girlfriend waiting and gradually guessing at the thoughts and feelings of men returned home from wars. The last chapters are therefore powered by stored energy. Yet both Joseph’s and David’s ‘secrets’
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
Twitter Feed
The ruler of Gwalior ‘named his son George after the British king. His counterpart in Bahawalpur ... boasted a collection of six hundred dildos, which Pakistan’s generals solicitously buried when they deposed him’.
@pratinavanil on India’s Maharajahs.
Pratinav Anil - Midnight’s Playboys
Pratinav Anil: Midnight’s Playboys - Dethroned: The Downfall of India’s Princely States by John Zubrzycki
literaryreview.co.uk
Dec’s Silenced Voices section of @lit_review features the scandalous criminalization of prominent 🇲🇪 academic Boban Batrićević (Faculty of Montenegrin Language & Literature)
His hearing for writing about hateful narratives spread by the Serbian Orthodox Church is on Jan 22nd
⬇️
‘We know that Ballard was many things – novelist, fabulist, one-time assistant editor of “British Baker”, seer of Shepperton, poet laureate of airports. But, it seems, he was not a fan of Mrs Dalloway.’
Joanna Kavenna - Unlimited Dream Company
Joanna Kavenna: Unlimited Dream Company - Selected Nonfiction, 1962-2007 by J G Ballard (Edited by Mark Blacklock)
literaryreview.co.uk