Review: The blood of the vampire, by Florence Marryat (1897)
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Category: Scarlet Letters
Nostalgia was like a vine, strangling her, sickly scented
Review: The Flesh of the Peach, by Helen McClorey
Look at the colour of it
Dear Ali, It takes us only a few paragraphs of Autumn (2016) to recognize your characteristic marks: experimental writing; a collage of literary references; a narrative propelled through voice and voice alone; a narrative that mingles past and present, as if they were one thing, happening at once; and, finally, the creative reframing of contemporary…
I’d forgotten it was summer outside
Dear Barbara, In your novel The Vet’s Daughter (1959), I felt I was being lured into a strange place, tender and cruel. I was being lured by a voice, tenuous but powerful, pushing me through the door into a confined domestic horror. It was lonely, dangerous and grotesque, but it was a voice I very…
She sensed a scream beneath the silence,
Review: The Beautiful Bureaucrat, by Helen Phillips
Dear Helen,
It is difficult to pin down your novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat (2015): a dystopia that reads like a thriller with brief incursions into horror, literary modernism and satire? It’s hard to say. But, by trying too much, and rushing to the tidy end, it might have fallen short of being great in any of these categories.
It was the memory of a memory by now—the hallmark of happiness, that scene
Review: In a Summer Season, by Elizabeth Taylor
We don’t have the more refined illnesses here
Dear Sofia, Reading your novel City Folk and Country Folk, translated by Nora Seligman Favorov (Городские и деревенские, 1863), feels like following a deceptively simple pattern with the tip of our fingers: we can cherish it for its softness to the touch; or we can look further into its intricacy, and admire the way the…
We are more porous than we know
Dear Emily, Although centred around a murder, your debut novel Idaho (2017) does not revolve around the questions of who might have done it or why; yours is much more a book about atmosphere; a collection of first impressions and lost tracks, crossed through by the motif of loss. In the middle of summer, on…
Trespassing on one’s own ground
Dear Monica, The atmosphere in your novel Mariana (1940) feels like a bright surface tinted by an added layer of nostalgia, and a pervading sense of loss. Like a moss-covered surface, damp to the touch, but, for that very reason, very much alive. When the book opens, Mary Shannon is spending a weekend alone with…
The girl is a peasant warrior
Dear Xiaolu, Your book Nine Continents (2017, also published in the UK with the title Once Upon A Time in the East: A Story of Growing up) is less a memoir than a collection of your personal myths. And it is a book about the transformative nature of art; about art as a means to escape,…
This moment of daybreak, and this singing back and forth
Dear Sarashina, I must confess that I have read your diary – and I did it twice. In my defense, I guess I could say that it is not exactly a diary, as we nowadays conceive of it; that it is highly imaginative rather than objective; and that it was meant to be a public…
It has a fascination of its own, that bend
Dear Lucy, At first, I felt skeptical about your novel Anne of Green Gables (1908). Anne seemed too chatty, too imaginative, too eager to please – too good to be true. Or perhaps I simply should have met her earlier, as a child of eleven, and on her own terms. But, gradually, so as it happened…
