When I first read an article about the death of Kim Wall and the Danish inventor, aptly called Peter Madsen, I thought it was a satirical piece. I thought that it was fiction. Doh! Recent world events and changes in world media should’ve told me, by now, that we live in a time of surreal…
Torture, simplicity and constipation This is the first time delving into any Japanese literature beyond Murakami, and Endo has impressed me. Mainly an autobiographical sort of writing – not unlike the Russian literature I was reading a few weeks back – Endo tackles the issue of growing up as Christian Japanese and explores how this…
Theresa May said this morning, in an uncharacteristically strong and stable manner, that she was going to crack down on terrorism. That ‘Enough is enough.’ In a blanket statement, she told the world that she is going to ‘regulate cyberspace.’ She is going to monitor ‘the Internet’, a land of safe spaces for extremism. I do not deny…
This isn’t some wishy-washy bullshit I’m going to put you through here. Utopia is unreachable. Duh. But hear me out. I’m a centrist. I tried really hard not to put too much weight on one side. Really. I did. But here’s how I see it. Disagree with me, please. To “survive” Brexit we need a strong…
Bruce Chatwin’s formative In Patagonia is inspiring, not only because of the alluring wilderness the book focuses on, but because the book itself defies all the tropes of its genre. You’d be hard-pressed to call this just ‘travel writing.’ Think more…fictionalised non-fiction, with a significant focus on space, place and the distinction between the two.…
I finished “One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich” in a rapid two days, caught up in the Kazakhstan snowstorm that is this novel. A scarcity of language that matched the bare exposure of the gulag system, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s controversial work gave me a new light on how much can be said with very little.…
When I was younger and grew up reading mostly fantasy (Magician by Raymond E. Feist is one of my all-time favourites) I didn’t pay attention to a lot. I just loved the magic, the dragons, the story. Looking back, when reading Magician for a fifth time, I noticed that the first line is objectively dull. The…
Roth’s “The Plot Against America” must’ve struck the average reader as pertinent when it was first published in 2004, given the growth of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflict, but nothing had prepared me for how shockingly the plot of this alternative-history novel reflects modern American society. Perhaps I am placing too much importance on my own…
Bui Vien is the central street in the backpacker district of Ho Chi Minh. At night, the street heaves with the coming and going of motorcycle and taxi traffic, which have to literally push through the body of people that line the pavement and road. There are small, re-purposed shops that sell tourists and locals…
This week has been both disgustingly shocking and happily reassuring. The media consistently spins out everything that goes wrong in Trump’s White House into a full-blown scandal. We’re going to have to put up with this for four years. This is what’s called “desensitization.” When will the media realise that this has been Trump’s grand…
Seal Matches 