LITERARY BENT – Writing at its best

Could any of us face the stark indifference of the universe courageously and alone? Camus offers us the character of Meursault in this novel of 1942, who attempts exactly that. Meursault is short on any kind of emotion and reacts (if at all) to the world with a kind of deadpan indifference. The novel is an […]

After Basil Hallward paints a beautiful young man’s portrait, his subject’s frivolous wish that the picture change and he remain the same comes true. Dorian Gray’s picture grows aged and corrupt while he continues to appear fresh and innocent. After he kills a young woman, ‘as surely as if I had cut her little throat

Enjoy this satire on 80s greed and vulgarity by Martin Amis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Amis). It is narrated by hedonistic slob John Self. 29 years on from its publication in 1984 one can only feel a sense of tiresome dismay that it all played out again and led to the financial crash of 2007/2008. The John Selfs of

Set in an unnamed African country after independence, the book is narrated by Salim, an ethnically Indian Muslim and a shopkeeper in a small, growing city in the country’s remote interior. Salim observes the rapid changes in Africa with an outsider’s distance. What he sees is chaos, violent change, warring tribes, ignorance, isolation, poverty and a lack

Anthony Burgess (1917 -1993, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Burgess) was a lapsed Catholic from Manchester who was not merely a prolific writer but composer as well. His Catholic background left defining influences in his thought and Earthly Powers (1980) is an epic investigation of human fallibility, the exercise of power, and of corruption. On his eighty-first birthday, retired gay writer

Catherine Vernon heads up the family bank in Redborough. She has been jilted in her youth like Miss Havisham in Great Expectations, and as a result casts a jaundiced eye on just about everything. Her iron will has brought her to prominence and losing control over any event in her purview is not to be

71 year old Coleman Silk, Dean of Athena College in New England, has been driven from his position by mischievous accusations of racism. After the death of his wife he takes up Faunia Farley, an illiterate milkmaid and cleaner at the college, who is half his age and has suffered a terribly battered life. Approaching the

There is not much of a plot to this novel of 1955. Humbert Humbert, European emigree literature professor, develops an obsession with 12 year old Dolores Haze, the daughter of his landlady. They take a road trip together after landlady Charlotte (and briefly Humbert’s wife) is killed by passing traffic. In gorgeous, lyrical and seductive prose (over which

Rubashov is an ex-Commissar of the People in a thinly disguised world of Moscow Show Trials (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Show_Trials) in this 1940 novel from Arthur Koestler. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Koestler) This is pretty hard-to-read stuff as we are taken deeper and deeper into the solitary agonies of Rubashov in prison, and as he is being ‘interrogated’ (i.e. psychologically tortured and beaten) by