Paul Ableman
Truth and Triumph
This is a very fine book and quite possibly a great one. But is it a novel? It is the story of a historical figure, Oskar Schindler, a Sudeten German, and it is the product of detailed research. The events it relates occurred in geographical locations and in historical time. Its characters all inhabited the earth and some still do. Keneally’s preface explains ‘it has been necessary to attempt to reconstruct conversations of which Oskar and others have left only the briefest record. But most exchanges and conversations, and all events, are based on… detailed recollections…’
Voices have been heard protesting that England’s premier prize for fiction, the Booker Prize, should not have been awarded, as it has been, to this work and that it cannot, by any legitimate extension of the term’s meaning, be considered a novel. If Schindler’s Ark merits a fiction award, the
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
'As it starts to infect your dreams, you realise that "Portal 2" is really an allegory of the imaginative leap: the way in which we traverse the space between distant concepts, via the secret conduits we place within them.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/portal-agony
'Any story about Eden has to be a story about the Fall; unchanging serenity does not make a narrative.'
@suzifeay reviews Jim Crace's 'eden'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/trouble-in-paradise
The first holiday camps had an 'ethos of muscular health as a marker of social respectability, and were alcohol-free. How different from our modern Costa Brava – not to mention the innumerable other coasts around the world now changed forever'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/from-mont-blanc-to-magaluf