In 1793, a canal digger named William Smith made a startling discovery. He found that by tracing the placement of fossils, which he uncovered in his excavations, one could follow layers of rocks as they dipped and rose and fell — clear across England and, indeed, clear across the world — making it possible, for […]
The Map that changed the World Read More »
A worthy winner of the Booker of Bookers, Midnight’s Children (1981) is a fantastic achievement in fiction by British Indian Salman Rushdie (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salman_Rushdie and http://www.salman-rushdie.com/ and http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/04/18/specials/rushdie.html) and already deemed a classic. It is a sophisticated blend of magical realism and historical fiction setting before us the (un)reality of post-colonial India. Gloriously witty and irreverent prose delivers
Midnight's Children Read More »
There has always been a tension in religion and spirituality between two impulses. These are 1) To affirm that the world is fundamentally good despite its imperfections, and therefore to embrace it. God, after all, is reported in Genesis 1:31 as follows: ‘And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was
It is 1926 and the First World War is gradually receding into the past. Tom Sherbourne is a young lighthouse keeper on a remote island off Western Australia. The only inhabitants of Janus Rock, he and his wife Isabel live a quiet life, cocooned from the rest of the world. The only, but huge, missing
The Light Between Oceans Read More »
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
Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler Read More »
OK, it’s possible to live as a hermit in some desert hideout and subsist on locust and wild honey. For most of us, though, we live in communities and are surrounded by people. This means we live in a moral context. All our actions, either by commission or omission, send out ripples of consequence like
Adam Bede by George Eliot Read More »
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
A Personal Matter by Kenzaburo Oe Read More »
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
The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles Read More »
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
The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers Read More »
