Literature

Novels, short stories and authors

Word4Word: Mau-mauing

A phrase I have never come across before which I think might be of interest. I was reading about the issues surrounding the resignation of Claudine Gay, the first Black President of Harvard University in the USA, in the ‘London Review of Books’. The arguments are quite involved and I give the reference at the end of this article so readers can check the details for themselves. The author, Randall Kennedy, referring back to the movement mobilised by the death of George Floyd, states, ‘They [university based activists] insisted that racism was so prevalent that black students felt, and were...

Word4Word: Bog standard

At a press briefing in February 2001, when he was Tony Blair’s Rottweiler (aka Prime Minsters’ Press Spokesman), Alastair Campbell declared that the days of the ‘bog standard comprehensive’ were over. Bog standard here meaning poor quality or, at best, ordinary. This caused some annoyance among Heads of comprehensives and others involved in education and even David Blunkett (Blair’s Rottweiler number two) expressed his abhorrence at the term, saying he neither recognised nor used it. Campbell later dismissed his comment as an ‘off-the-cuff-accident’, ignoring the rather obvious fact that as...

On reading Annie Ernaux

When, in 2022, Annie Ernaux became the first French woman to win the Nobel prize, the conservative newspaper Figaro disparaged the decision to award the “high priestess of autofiction” for a “lifetime spent writing about herself,” while Le Nouvel Observateur caricatured her as “Madame Ovary”. It is true that Ernaux’s books are relentlessly personal, each plumbing the depths of a particular period, event, or relationship in her own life. The illegal abortion she sought as a twenty-three year old student, her first sexual encounter, a year-long affair she had with a married man, her mother’s...

Word4Word: shithole

Continuing Professor Ampersand’s occasional online series discussing words or phrases of interest to the left.

A book about contradictions

Imagine your loved one is facing public accusations of misconduct from an anonymous Twitter account. This is the scenario explored in Yomi Adegoke’s The List , where Ola, a feminist writer, discovers that her fiancé, Michael, has been put on a list by an anonymous Twitter account detailing abusers in the media industry. And it’s only weeks away from their wedding. Adegoke has risen to fame as a Black feminist journalist having previously co-authored Slay In Your Lane , a book and then podcast that interviewed successful Black British women and was envisioned as “ Lean In , but for Black women”...

Kino Eye: Milan Kundera (1929-2023) and a “joke” about Trotsky

The famous Czech writer, Milan Kundera, died on 11 July. Best-known for The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), he also wrote The Joke in 1967. Adapted for the screen by Czech film director Jaromil Jireš in 1969, the “joke” in question refers to a comment by the main protagonist Ludvik Jahn, a Young Communist, who sends a postcard to his lover, Markéta, while attending a Party Summer School. Ludvik thinks Markéta is far too serious and although the postcard is obviously meant as a (not very funny) joke, the repercussions are serious. It reads: “Optimism is the opium of the people. A ‘healthy...

Country and city in Estonia

Indrek by A.H. Tammsaare is volume 2 of the "Truth and Justice" pentalogy The second of A. H. Tammsaare’s classic five volume epic of Estonian life is now available in English. I reviewed the first volume, ‘Vargäme’ online in Solidarity 638 . At the end of that volume, Indrek, son of the farmer Andres Paas, leaves Vargäme, the remote village of his birth, to settle in the university town of Tartu. In some respects it is a classic tale of country bumpkin meets the city. He attends the boarding school of odd-ball Headmaster Maurus, a figure straight out of Dickens (minus the violence). Indrek’s...

Kino Eye: My brilliant career

Long overdue in Kino Eye: a film from Australia. Gillian Armstrong’s My Brilliant Career (1979) was adapted from Miles Franklin’s novel of the same name, written in 1901 when Franklin was only 16 years old, and published in Britain by Virago in 1980. It tells the story of Sybylla Melvyn (Judy Davis), who lives on an isolated farm and dreams of becoming a writer. Her parents are not exactly overjoyed at this prospect and pack her off to board with their maternal grandparents, who they hope will make her see sense. She becomes close to Harry Beecham (Sam Neill), and he proposes, but Sybylla...

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