![the [blank] garden](https://theblankgarden.files.wordpress.com/2019/02/cropped-lucas-cranach-the-younger-6.png)
Dear Natalia, In Family Lexicon, tr. Jenny McPhee (2017. Original: Lessico famigliare, 1963), we have the impression of having been accepted as guests at your family’s dinner table: as we…… Read more “It takes one word,”
Tag: Readery Book Club
One’s prime is elusive
Dear Muriel, In The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), there is something in the eponymous protagonist that repels us, but there is also something that strongly…… Read more “One’s prime is elusive”
Trust is fine, but control is better
Dear Elfriede, Your novel The Piano Teacher, tr. Joachim Neugroschel (1988. Die Klavierspielerin, 1983) is vile and uncompromising: it dwells on the grotesque, crossed by an undercurrent…… Read more “Trust is fine, but control is better”
I was giving the glad-eye like blazes
Dear Connie, The Laws (1993, tr. Richard Huijing. De Wetten, 1991) reads like a draft of a draft: the shadow of an idea, hovering over the page…… Read more “I was giving the glad-eye like blazes”
The sky was red and all my life was in it.
Dear Jean, In your novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), you seem to be holding up a distorting mirror to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847): if we look…… Read more “The sky was red and all my life was in it.”
The force behind the movement of time is a mourning that will not be comforted
Dear Marilynne, My book club held a heated discussion on your book Housekeeping (1980) in May. I confess we were all enraptured by this compelling story of two…… Read more “The force behind the movement of time is a mourning that will not be comforted”
Their victims lie strewn all round
Dear Elizabeth, I’ve been meaning to write to you since the beginning of April, when the 1938 Club brought me right inside ‘the turned-in heart’ of your…… Read more “Their victims lie strewn all round”
But time flows in many streams,
Dear Kawabata-san, I first read your novel Beauty and Sadness (transl. by Howard Hibbett) in 2010, and I remember I was not very impressed nor particularly…… Read more “But time flows in many streams,”
