by jillemaclean | Nov 15, 2018 | Book Review, Novels I’ve Read
If The Dream of Scipio stirred me up, Days Without End almost wrecked me…what is it about a story that seizes you by the throat and won’t let go? First, a digression. After I heard Michael Ondaatje and Linda Spalding read in Halifax, I reread The English Patient and...
by jillemaclean | Nov 1, 2018 | Book Review, Books Other Than Novels
Imre Kertész, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002, chose first person for his semi-autobiographical Holocaust novel Fatelessness, published in 1975 as Fateless. In 1944, aged fourteen, he was one of the 440,000 Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz, where...
by jillemaclean | Oct 15, 2018 | Book Review
What can art do? And what can it not do? Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone asks both these questions, with an added dimension – can we make art when loneliness, to the point of extreme isolation, is the spur? Laing is a British...
by jillemaclean | Sep 30, 2018 | Book Review
Chris Cleave’s second novel, Little Bee, which goes by the title The Other Hand in the UK, is about a very serious subject and at no point as I read it did my eyes glaze over (his phrase). The brief blurb on the front cover is a ploy a publisher can use only rarely....
by jillemaclean | Sep 15, 2018 | Book Review, Novels I’ve Read
A friend gave me a copy of Iain Pears’s The Dream of Scipio several months ago because it’s set in Provence, which I’m visiting this year, and it’s partly about the plague of the mid-1300s, a century that has me hooked. I took over a week to read it. In it, the...
by jillemaclean | Jul 1, 2018 | Book Review
Can art be transformative? At Central Library in Halifax the week of Shakespeare’s birthday (after I’d written the previous Book Talk post on Hamlet), there was a display near the front door of books related to the bard. I picked up Shakespeare Behind Bars: The Power...
