David Annand
Having a Wales of a Time
I don’t suffer from synaesthesia, but occasionally I find that novels evoke colours, or at least a colour scheme. James Salter’s Light Years comes to me as if through a filter that turns everything a soft crepuscular yellow; Woolf’s The Waves is a murky, mythic, Pre-Raphaelitish green; Wallace’s Infinite Jest is similar but kaleidoscopic, packed with vibrant colours like the hundreds and thousands on children’s ice cream. This is pretty much the opposite of The Red House, Mark Haddon’s new book, which, despite its name, will be forever fixed in my mind as a washed-out blue-grey, the colour dramas used to be on BBC Two.
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
In Silenced Voices, @lucyjpop turns her attention to the journalist Svetlana Prokopyeva, and the historian and activist Yuri Dmitriev, both of whom have been 'imprisoned on trumped-up charges' in Russia.
http://ow.ly/MWow50xqJOC
https://literaryreview.co.uk/svetlana-prokopyeva-yuri-dmitriev
'His books ... seemed to anticipate the America that was throbbing all around me, with its violence and disappointments, its spiritual emptiness, its foolishness and its freaks.'
@PaulTheroux_ on the lure of Nathanael West.
http://ow.ly/WV2p50xrqOr
Stuck for a Christmas present this year? Give someone a Literary Review gift subscription!
Use the code 'GOODCHEER19', and you'll pay just £35 for a full year's subscription. We'll also throw in a handsome LR tote bag.
http://ow.ly/vC6p50xrtIo