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 memoir detailing the life of the author from the early seventies till the present in meticulous detail. And it is meticulous, maybe not quite as meticulous as other reviewers have hailed it as being, but very very detailed all the same. Continue reading
Posted by Jack Dunleavy
For those who can’t love Obama
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 serious tone and implicitly look down on anyone who doesn’t. Anyone frustrated by the impenetrable nature of long, solemn broadsheet articles about the recession or criminal justice and just wishes that someone would write about these things in a way which was not only amusing and colloquial, but also, at points, astonishingly beautiful. Anyone who hates Ian McEwan and Carol Ann Duffy but loves Kurt Vonnegut and David Foster Wallace. Anyone who hates David Cameron, wants to (but can’t quite) love Barack Obama and isn’t quite sure who they should be loving instead. All these people will love de la Pava and probably a whole load more people who love/hate the opposite of all these things. That’s the kind of writer he is. Continue reading
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North Korea and the maturity of Japan’s ‘enfant terrible’
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.
Nevertheless it is worth mentioning how for Westerners Japan is intrinsically linked with neon-lights, karaoke, samurais and an opaque alphabet, sometimes pejoratively but more often than not with a sense of awe at its sheer otherness, an impression forged somewhere in the mix of Takeshi’s Castle, Hokusai’s erotic prints and the simple beauty of a haiku; a mishmash of the impossibly frantic and the impossibly serene. Any person who can stand out as an ‘enfant terrible’ in this mix is bound to be of interest.
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Man Ray, high-modernism and a bizarre shaped bowler hat
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 of the 1920s and 30s.
This exhibition, the first major retrospective of Man Ray’s work by a major institution, focuses solely on his portrait photography. Continue reading
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A stiff translation but no sunflowers in sight
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. Though the pairing of contemporary design and 19th century fiction sounds problematic (as in Penguin’s grotesque range of ‘Penguin Classics Deluxe Editions’), Four Corners Books are consistently attractive, both on the cover and inside the book.
