December 2013

The Blind Man’s Garden

FANTASTIC FICTION - Escapes to other places and other times

Starving children who eat vomit and a prisoner chewing through one of his own arteries in an attempt to escape torture were among the horrors on show in Nadeem Aslam’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadeem_Aslam and http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2013/jan/26/nadeem-aslam-life-in-writing) previous novel, The Wasted Vigil, set in Afghanistan amid the rise and fall of the Taliban. In his new book we find children forced to drink urine and […]

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Excession

FANTASTIC FICTION - Escapes to other places and other times

Iain Banks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iain_Banks and http://www.iain-banks.net/) died on 9 June 2013. Diagnosed with terminal cancer of the gallbladder he wittily asked his long term partner Adele if she would do him the honour of becoming his widow (http://www.iain-banks.net/2013/04/03/a-personal-statement-from-iain-banks/). He has left multitudes of grieving fans. In the fifth book in the ‘Culture’ series, published 1996, he offers us

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Morvern Callar

FANTASTIC FICTION - Escapes to other places and other times, SCOTTISH INTEREST

Alan Warner (http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/may/25/life-in-writing-alan-warner and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Warner) gives us this peculiarly Scottish tale of purposelessness and amorality set in the 1980s. For it he won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1996 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somerset_Maugham_Award). Morvern Callar, a low-paid young woman in the local supermarket of a desolate and beautiful port town (Oban??) in the west of Scotland, wakes one morning in late December to find

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The Feeling of What Happens by Antonio Damasio

EGGHEAD CHOICE - Crack open for a hard boiled think, EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE - Science & Technology

Antonio Damasio (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Damasio and http://www.ted.com/speakers/antonio_damasio.html) does not claim to have solved the mystery of consciousness in The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. This is fortunate, because in many senses Damasio’s book does not provide much new information about consciousness and why its highest forms occur only in humans. Instead, Damasio

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The Trick Is To Keep Breathing

FANTASTIC FICTION - Escapes to other places and other times, SCOTTISH INTEREST

Meticulously observed, agonizing and funny, this unconventional account of clinical depression was the novelistic debut of the author of the praised short-story collection Blood (1991). Drama teacher Joy Stone has become severely depressed following the death of her married lover. Surrounded by his effects in the house they briefly shared, she can’t summon the will

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Our Fathers by Andrew O’Hagan

LITERARY BENT - Writing at its best, SCOTTISH INTEREST

Andrew O’Hagan (http://literature.britishcouncil.org/andrew-ohagan and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_O’Hagan) has been a contributing editor to the London Review of Books and Granta magazine. Our Fathers (1999), his first novel, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction and the Whitbread First Novel Award. In the novel we meet Hugh Provan who has been a Modernist hero. A dreamer, a Socialist, a

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