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…
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.…
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…
“I’m anxious.” I know you are. I walk behind you because if I walked in front of you you’d lose me and you’d get angry. There’s no point trying to negotiate. You think about the children, not you and I. Maybe it’s because you’re divorced, guilty, you keep me out all…
New year, new me, new you, new us, new together and new alone, new united, we stand turned boots to the future, arse to the past. We take one look over our shoulder, and with a sigh, say “Whatever,” then shrug, “This year will be better.”
(25) Breathless. Artificial air tastes like licked Lego, burned copper, dirty coin hands. My fingers are clenched and my skull throbs with the dull drum beat of a death march, kamikaze, this is the end. Last I remember is the grass, hands tearing on the hard earth, a pain like angry acupuncture. Doctor Remnbaud says…
(24) Kit Lock gets home in the early hours of the morning. Her husband’s shoes are not by the door and his coat is not on the rack. My husband, she thinks. She calls out his name even though it makes no difference and she thinks of calling Christian or Sally but neither of them…
(23) My feet don’t hit the right path, my ankles slip on the curb and the pavement moves like it shouldn’t. Kit’s blunt anger has spread across my body like lichen. The whiskey’s gone. I won’t go home. I won’t go home again. My eyes burn like rubbed-in chilli, I can barely keep them open.…
(22) Kit picks at a plate of cheese and pickles and crab stuffed into pastry balls garnished with brown dill. We are at an apex of a cacophony of second-hand voices and shrill laughter and the hearty crab-stained chuckles of too-old-to-be-trendy insurance brokers make my ear drums sting. There’s a group of four men with…
Seal Matches 