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Book review week: L’Assommoir by Emile Zola
Today’s review concerns the 1877 realist masterpiece, L’Assommoir by Émile Zola. The book still disturbs me. * Before he was famous for the Dreyfus Affair, before his reputation was trounced and then...
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Book review week: If This is a Man by Primo Levi
What is chastening about Levi’s writing is its freedom from self-indulgence. There isn’t even a hint of hysterical recrimination. How easy, and how understandable, it would have been for him to have...
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Book review week: Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes
After my father died, my mother moved from the family home and, before the move, she asked my siblings and I to go through the papers she had been storing in the garage. Sorting through my old school...
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Book review week: Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
What’s a book review week without the Russians? Nothing, is what! Time to wheel out the big guns, in fact, the biggest gun of all, Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, the best novel ever written, according...
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Book review week: Signs and Symbols by Vladimir Nabokov
This is the final in the book review week. I debated which review to include – I was tossing up between two – and then I read this one and started crying. Had to be this one. I trust my tears to tell...
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Hot milk goodness #1
Hot Milk by Deborah Levy continues to be exhilarating. I’m going to share some over the next day or two. Here’s a section from the scene called “Boldness” in which Sofia finally takes action after Dr...
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Hot milk goodness #2
Today’s instalment from Hot Milk by Deborah Levy concerns Sofia and her mother, Rose, driving to a local market. They have come to the baked out, rocky coast of Spain to consult the famous...
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Hot milk goodness #3
One of the things Hot Milk by Deborah Levy is concerned with is what it means to be a woman, or a man for that matter. As many individuals and schools of thought have realised, the more one looks into...
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Hot milk goodness #4
There’s another ancient topic in Hot Milk by Deborah Levy, maybe the only topic there ever is: families, or as Sofia, the stalled anthropologist, whose full name is Sofia Irina Papastergiadis, puts it:...
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“I look back fondly …”
My friend, Nadene, has been writing a daily post on Facebook about things people may not know about her. She’s had a group of us glued to her posts for her humour and her willingness to go places other...
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