LITERARY BENT – Writing at its best

How should the anti-hero, Bird, deal with the intrusion into his life of a brain-damaged child? Welcome to the sordid underbelly of Japan. It’s all a long way from the hyper-ordered, law abiding, civil society that we imagine. Oe’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenzabur%C5%8D_%C5%8Ce) striking and vivid language matches perfectly the depravity into which Bird descends in his attempt to evade […]

American couple Port and Kit Moresby seek to escape the corrupting influences of the modern world by travelling into the Algerian Sahara. Wherever you travel, though, you never really escape yourself. The exotic landscapes, and the trials within them, only serve to intensify the couple’s mutual estrangement. Latch this onto a pervasive mood of threatening

McCullers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carson_McCullers) takes us to a Georgia mill town in the 1930s. The characters she portrays yearn for something beyond the sun baked tedium of small town life. The central character is John Singer, a deaf-mute, through whom we meet and are made to enter into the lives of the dispossessed. There is a remarkable surety of

Meet identical twins Dora and Nora Chance in this rollicking family saga revolving around the British music hall scene. Witty and pulsating with imaginative power, this is sure to entertain you. Published by Angela Carter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angela_Carter#Biography) in 1991, this was her last novel. 256 pages in Vintage Classics paperback edition. ISBN 978-0099981107 Angela Carter  

The setting is the Italian city of Ferrara on the eve of the Second World War. The rich and detached Jewish family of Finzi-Continis keep themselves secluded in their ostentatious property behind an imposing garden wall. The narrator, Giorgio, a poorer member of the Jewish community, falls in love with their lovely daughter Micol. Having met her

An elite and detached group of six classics students at a small Vermont college murder one of their number. How has this come about? The students are steeped in the cold, hard, and pure reality of the ancient Greek culture. Their characters undergo small steps and changes of mind that makes it possible for them to

This is an account of an American personal and family tragedy. The author does not disguise the character of this novel – it is a Garden of Eden tale set in the post-war United States with some rather nasty serpents. The Chapter headings are ‘Paradise Remembered‘, ‘The Fall‘, and ‘Paradise Lost‘. Playing by all the

Solzhenitsyn (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solzhenitsyn) presents us with a group of cancer patients in a Soviet hospital in 1955. Together they are representative of Russian society of the time. Politics and ideology come under discussion on the ward. It’s the author’s understanding of how patients crumble under the pressure of their disease, though, that gives the novel its power. Vadim,