Claire Lowdon
Too Much of a Good Thing
In an interview with the Daily Telegraph in 2011, A L Kennedy objected to ‘Hollywood endings’ and ‘people wanting the unobtainable’. She’s certainly not a writer we associate with happily-ever-after: her 2009 short story collection, What Becomes, asked what exactly does become of the brokenhearted, while in 2011’s All the Rage (more short stories), one character defines ‘the real experience of love’ as ‘having unreasonably lost all shelter’. Connections missed, damaged people doing damage to one another, loss, loneliness, the despair and rage that lurk beneath the everyday: these are the key ingredients of Kennedy’s inimitable fiction, leavened by some of the driest, blackest humour on the market.
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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