The universe, the 18th-century mathematician and philosopher Jean Le Rond d’Alembert said, ‘would only be one fact and one great truth for whoever knew how to embrace it from a single point of view.’ James Gleick (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Gleick and http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/Glei) has just this perspective, and signals it in the first word of the title of his new book, The […]
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
The Blind Man’s Garden Read More »
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
Burial Rites (2013) is the work of an Australian who visited Iceland on a cultural exchange. Based on a true 19th-century story, this powerful book has the stark and tragic tone of the sagas, where a veneer of Christianity cannot conceal a bleak and stoic belief in the workings of fate. Old superstitions are rife, and
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
Ian Rankin (http://www.ianrankin.net/) is on top form with the 8th in the Inspector Rebus series. This detective novel is full of wit, style and intricacy. Bible John killed three women, and took three souvenirs. Johnny Bible killed to steal his namesake’s glory. Oilman Allan Mitchelson died for his principles. And convict Lenny Spaven died just to prove
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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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
The Trick Is To Keep Breathing Read More »
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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