Patrick Skene Catling
Old China Hands
The prolific and versatile A N Wilson has written an old-fashioned family saga that is ‘meant to be read as fiction’, he says, ‘even though it is intended, in part, as an act of homage to one of the great men of our history’. That man was the master potter who founded the industrial dynasty Josiah Wedgwood & Sons, of which the author’s father was a managing director. Before Josiah established his pottery in Burslem, England used to eat off pewter and wooden platters; since then, the tableware has become finer.
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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