Wendy Brandmark
Setting the Golem Free
You don’t have to be a New York Jew to appreciate Cynthia Ozick’s fiction, but you have to be willing to cut yourself free of reality. Beneath Ozick’s modern mockery and her characters’ self-obsession lurk the prophetic rage and miracles of the Old Testament. This collection spans over thirty years of her short fiction, with many of the pieces taken from books published in the 1970s. There is only one new story.
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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