Marcus Berkmann
Suicide Central
Nick Hornby is probably easy to hate. Having started his career by creating an entirely new genre (the wry sport-obsessed memoir, which made it possible for anyone with an obsession and a plausible prose style to write and have published their own wry memoir), he has since produced a series of novels that have pulled off the double whammy of which we all dream: almost universal critical acclaim, and sales in their millions. Football fans say they hate him because he supports Arsenal; a lot of writers I know hate him because he is hugely rich and has his own website. Only readers fall upon his books with simple, unabashed delight, and there are several good reasons for this, all of them enshrined within the hard covers of his latest, A Long Way Down.
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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