Diana Athill
Purple Prose
Indigo: In Search of the Colour That Seduced the World
By Catherine E McKinley
Bloomsbury 256pp £16.99
Indigo mimics and holds all that is in my eye: blackness and light, birth and death, the passages between them. Indigo is not really a colour, it is not a cloth I realized. It is only the tangible intangible. The attempt to capture beauty, to hold the elusive, the fine layer of skin between the two. Death is a praising of life; death teaches us how to live. Colour, cloth is simply the praise song. And so I embraced blackness as my route to blue.
If that quotation from early in this book appeals to you, you will enjoy Catherine McKinley’s story – a story in which fact is often obscured by feeling. I confess to having had a hard time getting through it, made harder by the writer’s slapdash approach to syntax, which
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
When @djbduncan notices the text for a literary jigsaw puzzle had been written by a former colleague, his head spins. A wild surmise. Are jigsaws REF-able?
Dennis Duncan - The W Factor
Dennis Duncan: The W Factor
literaryreview.co.uk
In an effort to scold drinkers, Victorian temperance societies furiously marked every drinking establishment with a red X on city maps. It was a spectacular case of propaganda backfiring.
@foxtosser explores the history of drink maps
Edward Brooke-Hitching - From Beer Street to Gin Lane
Edward Brooke-Hitching: From Beer Street to Gin Lane - Drink Maps in Victorian Britain by Kris Butler
literaryreview.co.uk
How did a workers’ insurance agent who died of tuberculosis at the age of forty become a global literary icon?
@MortenHoiJensen on Kafka's metamorphosis
Morten Høi Jensen - Paranoid Humanoid
Morten Høi Jensen: Paranoid Humanoid - Metamorphoses: In Search of Franz Kafka by Karolina Watroba; Kafka: Making o...
literaryreview.co.uk