Elspeth Barker
O! Pull Aside the Veil
The Life of Rebecca Jones
By Angharad Price (Translated by Lloyd Jones)
MacLehose Press 159pp £10 order from our bookshop
This marvellous book contrives to be both a memoir and a novel for reasons I may not divulge. It is an account of 100 years in the lives of a Welsh hill-farming family, told by the oldest child, Rebecca, born in 1905. She was named after her mother and grandmother; her life began in a valley worked by her forebears for almost 1,000 years. ‘Tradition had a hold on me from the moment I was born,’ she tells us. This sense of continuity is the book’s driving force, symbolised by the stream that runs through the valley, irrigating, quenching, cleansing and providing electricity, the bringer of light.
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
Take advantage of our Spring offer today. Try 3 issues for £5.
Use code 'SPRING3FOR5' at checkout.
https://www.mymagazinesub.co.uk/literary-review/promo/spring3for5/
'The unisexual roster saves us from diatribes about the iniquity of the male gaze, and in any case the female gaze is capable of retaliating by aestheticising and eroticising the bodies of men.'
Peter Conrad on @markcousinsfilm's new documentary.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/lets-get-this-show-on-the-road
Dethier 'writes about mud buildings without the telltale modulations other critics use to distance so-called vernacular construction from the canon of high architecture.'
Building with earth may be the future, says @PhinHarper.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/build-brown-go-green