Richard Godwin
Richard Godwin Savours Five First Novels
Communism would appear to have been kind to Anatoly Sukhanov, hero of The Dream Life of Sukhanov by Olga Grushin. The editor of an art journal that toes the party line, he has a handsome Moscow flat, a beautiful wife, two bright teenage children, a dacha and a chauffeur whose name he can never remember. He is full of the sort of complacent pride that comes before a most ignominious fall.
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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