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Some relationships require a lot, don’t you think? There is no timely and gentle unveiling of our interior or a patient knock on the door from which we can turn away. No, no, these relationships are an invasion, a real pirate-boarding with swashbuckling and cannon. There is no rest even in the corners of our minds. I’ve been thinking about these differing kinds of relationships, the gentle ones where the two are side-by-side, where the internal voice is louder and has more room and then the relationship where the two are facing, asking questions and answering back, delving into all there is. It is VirginiaRead More →

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We are universes within ourselves, I think he meant to say.  We are a constant interplay between the world inside our head and one beyond it.  Life as we experience it is an alchemy of the two.  Our mind flits from one thing to another drawing unique connections between our senses and our memories.  The lilt of a song can morph into a memory, even if it be a misheard song or a misremembered memory, and can carry us far from where we are now.  It’s extraordinary what we do inside our heads. I wonder if we are not all half-mad and I have JamesRead More →

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Catch the Moon, Mary is more than a love story. It’s a story about the nature of love … and of sacrifice and perseverance. Young Mary is a gifted musician, living with an abusive father, when her music attracts the attention of a fallen angel, Gabriel. A deal is struck. He will protect her from her father, if she gives over her rights to her music. It is through the music he may redeem himself and re-enter heaven. This work of magical realism is parable-like; musical in its rhythm and glorious in its language. It requires one to slow down, take snippets and sample themRead More →

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“They will be great!” we think as parents of newborns. “They will go on to live exceptional lives!” But sitting on our shoulder whispering in our ear is our less certain self. It may not turn out the way we would like, it says. It may not turn out at all. I’ve been thinking about broken hearts and lost dreams, since reading Chigozie Obioma’s, The Fishermen. It is impossible not to think such things having spent time between the pages of this beautiful book. Obiama’s novel is set in the town of Akure in southwestern Nigeria during the 1990’s. It follows the fate of one family,Read More →

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We think they don’t move, but they do. We think they don’t communicate, but we are wrong. They live on a different time frame, that’s all; one that takes in the great vistas from an age before people. Their gaze is farseeing, beyond us (over our heads, so to speak), and hopefully will persist long after we are gone. That is, if the world is lucky. They are trees and this novel from Richard Powers allows us to get close to something marvellous and infinitely more valuable than the surfaces of our floors, the frames of our houses, and our own front doors. You see,Read More →

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What takes us back to another time? I’m not talking about a memory, something viewed from afar. I’m talking about us slotting back into the skin of our younger selves, looking through those younger eyes and taking it all in with our younger minds. It’s so rare, I think, this kind of transportation, but when it does happen its powerful. It lingers for days. This is how I felt after reading Tim Winton’s, The Turning. My own childhood, my adolescence came back to me. I know it is partly because he is Australian and a coastal dweller and that he is just a tad olderRead More →

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How reckless, how dangerous, we can be in the grip of an obsession. We can steal, lie, do murder even. And just before you say, not I, know that if this can happen with Terence Greene, oh yes, it can happen with you. Terence is the protagonist in Joyce Carol Oates’ novel, Double Delight. He is the director of a charity, (a deft move by Oates to give him gravitas) and lives in the wealthy suburb of Queenston, New Jersey. He wears expensive suits during the week and, when not socialising with the other well-to-do residents of Queenston, he fiddles with his small DYI projectsRead More →

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We know we are destructive creatures, but to this I now add ridiculous and delusional. It’s how we go on, isn’t it, in the face of our inevitable end. It makes it possible for us as readers to enter a graveyard and cavort with the dead and pity them their unfinished business. This is the scene set by George Saunders in his novel, Lincoln in the Bardo. We are easily drawn into his tale of these malformed spirits, who despite all they witness, cling to the lives which have long-since left them. This is a netherworld where coffins become ’sick-boxes’ and the life they onceRead More →

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Review by Gabrielle Blondell It can be weird, eerie even, after a relationship breaks down. Try as we might to stay singular in a partnership, there is a blurring of lines. We borrow from each other – ideas, beliefs, underpants. It’s easier that way, economic. So when the relationship dissolves, it’s a wrench. We are left with pieces missing. It’s not just who we are now that is the challenge. It’s how we have changed since the last time we were single. A metamorphosis has occurred and moving on seems so difficult with our newly partial selves. Haruki Murakami’s novel, Killing Commendatore, reminds me ofRead More →

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“Wherever human beings dream of a dignified and free society in which they can harvest the fruits of their own labor, The Grapes of Wrath’s radical voice of protest can still be heard.”  Robert DeMott says this in his introduction to the Penguin edition of Steinbeck’s depression era novel and its difficult to get past it.  Of course, I read the introduction after I’d finished the novel, so the bit about getting past it is a lie.  What I mean is I could not find other better words to describe what I was left with once the reading was done. There was churning in theRead More →