Anne and Margot hidden so long under the stars, covered with little more than a voice, filled the lines with time and there emerged what people call a diary. The book of days of one became canon. The other has disappeared from this earth. Is Schwester von und Tochter von, barely remembered as such e
Readers long spellbound by Ferrante’s Valhalla-like worlds of the Italian South, her redoubtable skills as a writer, the swarming opacity of the mystery that enshrouds her, her ‘voice’, defying every categorisation, or even personification, will instantly pick up the familiar echoes and sounds
The amorphous and labyrinthine structure of Kokoschka’s Doll is certainly demanding. Portuguese polymath Afonso Cruz presents an array of parallel and tangential stories and themes that propel, then divert, and then re-establish the thrust of the novel’s narrative time and again. Ostensibly, thi
In her celebrated 1964 memoir La Bâtarde, Violette Leduc recounts the genesis of her first novel, at the instigation of her friend and weary confidant, the writer Maurice Sachs: ‘Your unhappy childhood is beginning to bore me to distraction. This afternoon you will take your basket, a pen,
A year ago, I was given the chance to leaf through Roald Dahl’s mother’s book of Norwegian fairy tales. The slim volume, held in the Roald Dahl archives in Great Missenden, were published in 1909 and contained fourteen stories collected by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe. The storiesâ
Knut Hamsun detested England. To the Nobel laureate, the island in the west embodied modernity at its worst: industrialism, materialism, the uprooting of mankind from its rural past. The only thing that could match the intensity of his Anglophobia was his admiration for fascist strongman leaders. Ha
