Category: Uncategorised
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“‘It must be scary to be here on your own.’ ‘It’s scary to age alone.’ ‘It’s scary to be young alone.’ ‘We are all ultimately alone.’” When a book begins with a whole-ass family tree, you know it’s going to be something of an epic. And this epic took me so long to wade through…
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“Sometimes, the unjustly downtrodden took up arms and fierce miens, but equally often they turned the other cheek, studied harder, camouflaged themselves ever more behind obedience and merit and bided their time, believing against all evidence that the future would bring something better, for them if for nobody else. He tried to be the second…
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“The snow had changed things. They were in the world differently now, people understood that.” I have always found that there is a magical quality about snow: it creates a liminal space out of the ordinary where everything stops, and somehow, there, life happens. People come together or are pushed apart. Eric and Irene, Rita…
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“I asked her: ‘But why are they here?’ To which the answer was the Big Bang, which was not an answer, because the Question of Questions wasn’t ‘Why are there stars in the sky?’ but rather ‘Why is anything anywhere?’” One Boat is a book that deals with Big Questions. A bereaved woman retraces her…
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“They needed each other to bear witness, because the rest of the world didn’t.” Thus begins the story of Yeva and her extremely endangered left-shelled snail companion, Lefty. (Did you know that snails have a ‘handedness’? Well, now you do.) Yeva travels round Ukraine in a mobile lab trailer, attempting to rescue and find mating…
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“People always talked about having children as an event, as a thing that took place, they forgot that not having children was also something that took place, that is to say it wasn’t a question of absence, a question of lack, it had its own presence in the world, it was its own event.” The…
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This isn’t it; this is my bookshelf showcasing the first half of my Booker reading project: I wasn’t kidding about The Little Prince being my favourite book, by the way; as you can see, I like to collect it in different languages from places I visit. You probably won’t guess, so I’ll tell you for…
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“I had a sense of undigested emotional material, which is really just a disconnect between the totally normal passage of time you happen to be in and the totally normal passage of time that is about to follow, after which everything will be different.” The story opens – quite mundanely, I thought – with Tom,…
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“Like seaweed, we floated untethered, without the anchor of intimacies.” Misinterpretation is a novel about connection, about how people connect – tenatatively, fragilely, often talking past each other. …And, it is also a story about a translator. Which should make it right up my alley. 😊 The story – told by an unnamed female narrator…
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‘Politics – so dull,’ he says. ‘This world’s so full of noise and most of it is pointless.’ And ain’t that the truth. Seascraper is a book which steers away from politics entirely and focuses on the hard worn day-to-day of survival. Although never stated in words, I dated the story to exactly 1962 –…
The Booker Review 