Christopher Hitchens
The Shock of Reality
Move Your Shadow: South Africa Black and White
By Joseph Lelyveld
Michael Joseph 390pp £14.95 order from our bookshop
The first time that I visited South Africa, I had an experience that I have since learned is common among radicals, liberals, conscience-mongers and other assorted malcontents. One arrives fully kitted out with idées reçues, prepared to believe the worst and ready to point the finger of obloquy and scorn. And yet the living reality is somewhat different – unsettlingly so, in fact. Apartheid is much, much worse than one has been led to believe. All those memoirs by exiles and by former detainees; all those accounts of Sharpeville and Soweto; all the panoply of pseudo-scientific racial calibration – it pales, if the word is allowable, in the shock of reality.
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
'Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, once asked Isaiah Berlin who his ideal dinner guest would be. Without hesitation Berlin exclaimed, ‘William James!’'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-pragmatists-progress
'She digs her images into her story, so that they blow up like psychic land mines when the reader’s perception brushes against them.'
Hilary Mantel reviewing Margaret Atwood: a #BookerPrize double-header from the archive.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-realist-with-wings
In Ali Smith's "Summer", 'the coronavirus pandemic has arrived. Lockdown happens too. There are allusions to Black Lives Matter, to online abuse and radicalisation, to things so recently news that it feels shocking to find them in a novel.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/seasons-heatings