.

Friday 31 October 2014

Mysteries


Mysteries - Knut Hamsun
Translated by Gerry Bothmer
"In the middle of the summer of 1891 the most extraordinary things began happening in a small Norwegian coastal town. A stranger by the name of Nagel appeared, a singular character who shook the town by his eccentric behaviour and then vanished as suddenly as he had come."

I was inspired to read Mysteries by the fact that both Richard at Caravana de Recuerdos and Tom at Wuthering Expectations would be reading it and it seemed like too good an opportunity to read it alongside two of my favourite bloggers. (Indeed Tom has already started splashing ideas about in this post; and there will possibly be more by the time I finish this post). I already wanted to read more Hamsun after reading Hunger and happened to have this one on my shelves. There are sure to be many angles on this book, which, as the title suggests, is hard to pin down.

Tuesday 21 October 2014

Top 102 Albums Minus 15 - Broken English


Top 102 Albums Minus 15
Broken English - Marianne Faithfull

A few weeks back, watching Later with Jools Holland I was delighted to see Marianne Faithfull appear and since then I have been listening regularly to Broken English, her coruscating and quite brilliant album from 1979. It brings together her sixties credentials with songs from John Lennon (Working Class Hero) and a song from underground provocateur Heathcote Williams (Why'd Ya Do It) and a sound that owes more to Giorgio Moroder than the folk and country stylings of her earlier work.

Essay published on the Thresholds International Short Story Forum.


Essay published on the Thresholds International Short Story Forum.

The blog post previously known as Four Stories and Me, which I had written for a competition on the Thresholds International Short Story Forum has been edited to Three Stories and Me and published on Thresholds.

The site is hosted by The University of Chichester and has a number of interesting essays and links for lovers and authors of short stories everywhere.

Pay them a visit - THRESHOLDS


Sunday 19 October 2014

The Goats are Singing - Sudden Times


The Goats are Singing
Sudden Times - Dermot Healy

"The regrets come with a vengeance. The want of revenge comes with a vengeance."

Sudden Times seems to me to be the most concentrated and controlled of Healy's books. The narrative voice is carefully and shaped and the structure is that of a thriller, with details being drip fed to us to let us know that there will be a revelation by the end. For a long time we are not sure what that revelation will be, and it leaves us feeling unsure as to how to judge the narrator. Is he suffering from grief or guilt? Or both.

The book comprise of a series of very short chapters titled rathered than numbered. Some are no more than a sentence. The titles are sometimes gnomic, often comic and always in dialogue with their respective 'chapters'. Healy's skills as a poet and playwright are in evidence throughout.

Thursday 9 October 2014

Fourteenth Floor - The Drays

Fourteenth Floor - The Drays

When I heard that Stephen Ryan (ex Stars of Heaven and The Revenants) was releasing new material I was excited. A year or so after hearing about it I finally heard it when the actor Aidan Gillen played a song on the radio when he was standing in for Tom Dunne. He linked it up with an Alex Chilton cover of a Seeds song - I Can't Seem to Make You Mine.


The Goats are Singing - The Bend for Home


The Goats are Singing
The Bend for Home - Dermot Healy

My enjoyment of re-reading Healy's sparkling and generous memoirs has been enhanced by reading it alongside his other books. It is possible to see how many of the incidents outlined here have metamorphosed into parts of his fiction.

The forces that create the writer are at the very heart of this book, with even Healy's birth connected umbilically to the well of fiction. The book opens with the story of his birth, or at least the story he long believed was of his birth. The mix of humour and contrariness reminded me of Laurence Sterne, and also of Monty Python.

Sunday 5 October 2014

The Great Christmas Carve Up! December Readalong.


The Great Christmas Carve Up! 
December Readalong of Jonathan Coe's What a Carve Up!

This post on Jonathan Coe's Expo 58 has led to a proposed readalong of Coe's eighties satire What a Carve Up! which has the reputation of being great fun and one of the most successful satires of recent times. (It was published in the US as The Winshaw Legacy)

It seems somehow appropriate following the stir caused by Hilary Mantel's The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher to take another baleful look at the acquisitive and divisive eighties when Thatcher and Reagan did their level best to reintroduce feudalism.

Committed readers already include star bloggers Guy at His Futile Preoccupations or The Years of Reading Aimlessly…; Jacqui at JacquiWine's Journal and Kim at Reading Matters , and me.