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H(A)PPY by Nicola Barker

Posted by Gareth R Davies on April 16, 2023

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Awaiting review...

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Our Ancestors by Italo Calvino

The dog signifies nothing... Now is as good a time as any I suppose to admit that I regularly confuse Italo Calvino with Umberto Eco and when struggling for the name of one of them, invariably come up with the name of the other. What value does this add to a review of either’s work? None whatsoever. I just thought it would pay to be honest up front, so that if I start talking about semiotics, the discourse of literary criticism, or beards, then you’ll know my train of thoughts has switched tracks and is heading for a bridge under construction. Of course, reading the Wiki pages on the two of them (to make sure I was talking about the right fellow) I noticed with some dread that Our Ancestors is one of the best known works of the most translated contemporary Italian writer (at the time of his death) and here I am, trying to make sense of it in my own personal context. Well, I’m always going to be treading down some fool’s heels so why should I care if it’s actually most peopl...

The Heat's On by Chester Himes

It was laughter dripping wet with tears. Coloured people's laughter. It’s not something on which I’ve dwelled for any great length of time, conventionally or historically – although it is now creeping around the page edges of the fictionalised autobiography in the shop window of my thoughts thanks to books like Glyph by Percival Everett amongst others – but I am guilty of what Siang Lu calls , “ontological whiteness - where you default a character, if not otherwise specified, as white.” In all honesty, guilt probably isn’t the correct response as it would imply that there is a right and wrong way to imagine the characters in a novel, when matters of culture and nurture and considered, and assuming people are WASPs (like me) is devilment, although bias is perhaps an imbalance at best. I refer you to the chapter in Glyph where baby Ralph states for the first time to the reader that he isn’t white, despite what the reader might assume (leading in my case at least to a notably reverse...

The One from the Other by Philip Kerr

True decadence involves taking nothing seriously. Philip Kerr is an author I have been reluctant to attempt to review for some time. His Berlin Noir trilogy cost me some hours of sleeplessness and in the end I decided to skip a review and just be happy to have read it and therefore move it from the pile of unread novels, via the edge of my desk where the “to review” pile occasionally falls over on to the typewriter and spills my pen pot across the floor and thus causes significant risks when stumbling blindly about the room at night too drunk to remember where my bed is or having just been jolted awake by the boy shrieking from the next room and running asleep into walls and doors, to the back half of my giant Ikea bookcase where novels that have been read and have caused my self-esteem to shatter on the diamond-hard edges of someone else’s talent currently reside, gathering dust and moisture until hitting the mildew tipping point and becoming physically dangerous in their own right....

The Sealed Knot by Clare Clark

No, it IS good, I promise! I’m at a low ebb. The creative vim and vigour I felt after the week-long writing-slash-wellness-slash-cold-water-swimming (voluntary) retreat to which I retreated in September* has through temporal entropy become foggy and indistinct; coupled with what feels like a year-long cold I can barely lift my AeroPress®™ espresso without sighing. It didn’t help that in all the beautiful photos taken by the immensely talented Jassy Earl (quickly, send her money , you feckless boobs!) I look like a fat, 46-year-old who’s going all-in on his dad-jowls and is resigned to his fate – not even Jassy can disguise the attritional damage of time and neglect. So, to start a new sentence with a preposition, I decided that the only way to lift my spirit is to lift up other people, starting with Jassy but continuing with my good friend Clare Harman Clark and her historical romance (histomance? romanstory? romantasy? Where’s a good portmanteau when you need one?) The Seal...

The Hero With A Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell

Currently re-reading, again... Yeah, yeah, I know. Where's the review, eh? Well, don't let me disappoint you. I'm not planning to write a review of this one. In fact, I'm unlikely ever to write a review of it. This is partly because I plan to keep re-reading it in perpetuity until I understand it completely. Of course, there have been numerous famous faces who rubbished the Disney-esque narrative theories of Campell, but in truth, I can't help but love this book, even if I can't help but misunderestimate it. It's fab. It has a permanent home on the shelf next to my bed, along with Michel de Montaigne , the collected stories of Angela Carter , and William Hjortsberg's biography of Richard Brautigan . (Paid links)

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H(A)PPY by Nicola Barker

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