D J Taylor
Naked in Nottingham
Back in 1975, the New Fiction Society – a highbrow book club underwritten at calamitous expense by the Arts Council – took out a full-page advertisement in The Observer to promote its inaugural list. The ad took the form of a series of portraits, each attached to a starkly interrogative caption. One of these demanded of its subject, ‘Is this a working-class novelist?’ It was a good question, as working-class novelists nearly always turn out to be a heterogeneous bunch, keen to resist the broad categorisations wished upon them by textbooks or the smash-and-grab raids of social historians anxious to fillet their novels for supporting detail.
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 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
It's 'all lively and entertaining but rather too black and white. Her account of British politics and the success of the Brexit campaign verges on the cartoonish.'
@David_Goodhart on Anne Applebaum's 'Twilight on Democracy'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-tale-of-two-parties