My Struggle? How will they market that in Germany?

by Jack Dunleavy.

What a glorious novel this is! What a revelation! Twenty-first century literature has a saviour! His name is Marcel Proust, or, in the original Norwegian, Karl Ove Knausgaard. The book that has saved us all? My Struggle, or, in the original Norwegian, Min Kamp (one wonders how it’ll be marketed in Germany…) six volumes of […]

For those who can’t love Obama

by Jack Dunleavy.

I’m willing to make a bet: five years from now, everyone will be talking about Sergio de la Pava. This is an exaggeration obviously, but anyone who likes The Wire will be talking about him, or Louis Ck, or The Occupy Movement. Anyone who is frustrated by ‘literary’ books which cover serious themes in a […]

North Korea and the maturity of Japan’s ‘enfant terrible’

by Jack Dunleavy.

Ryu Murakami is apparently ‘the enfant terrible of contemporary Japanese literature’. I suppose I should start this review of his four books translated into English this year by making general comments about the strangeness of Japanese culture. Yet such observations have been made ad nauseum, and only reflect the Westerner’s shock that anything exists outside their sphere of influence. […]

Man Ray, high-modernism and a bizarre shaped bowler hat

by Jack Dunleavy.

Born in Philadelphia in 1890, Emmanuel Radnitzky – better known as Man Ray, was a pioneering American Modernist. His work in sculpture, painting, film and most significantly photography helped widen the definition of ‘Art’ in the early part of the 20th century, as well as providing a fascinating document of Bohemian life in the Paris […]

A stiff translation but no sunflowers in sight

by Jack Dunleavy.

JACK DUNLEAVY is impressed by the presentation and artwork of a new edition the French classic, yet finds that the text itself becomes secondary. Since 2004, London based publishing company Four Corners Books have been collaborating with contemporary artists to produce a series of ‘Four Corners Familiars’, new, artistic and innovative editions of classic novels. […]

Review: The Silence and the Roar, by Nihad Sirees

by Jack Dunleavy.

During the Second World War, a spokesman of the Vichy Government criticised the films of poetic-realist director Marcel Carné for their pessimism, saying that ‘if we have lost the war it is because of Le Quai des Brumes’. Carné is supposed to have retorted that you ‘cannot blame a storm on the barometer’*. For better […]

Translated today. Or maybe yesterday; I don’t know.

by Jack Dunleavy.

Albert Camus’ novel The Outsider is the subject of a new Penguin translation. For JACK DUNLEAVY, re-translation is a necessity, not to provide a definitive edition but to remind us that reading French texts in English is ‘at best an equivalent and at worst an approximation of the original’. In the past 5 or so […]

How to avoid bland book designs this Christmas

by Jack Dunleavy.

Everybody can recognise a Penguin book. The delicious orange and cream bands, reminiscent of a carrot cake, are as much a feature of 20th century British design as a red telephone box or a London taxi. Sadly though, Penguin books have not looked much like this since the mid 1960s, and when we think of […]

Modern art: politics and paradox

by Jack Dunleavy.

A charismatic account of the past 150 years comes from BBC Arts correspondent Will Gompertz. But, asks JACK DUNLEAVY, how did modern art end up embodying so many contradictions? The general public’s view of contemporary art has become something of a paradox. In the media it is portrayed at times as a money-guzzling demon, and […]

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