Archive for May, 2011

“. . . I didn’t know of Simons’s work until last month, when the editor of this, his second novel, enthused about it. A few weeks later a copy was pressed into my hands by the publisher, but it’s only in the past few days that I have found time to read it.

The English German Girl is a thoroughly researched recreation of the life of a professional Jewish family in Berlin, under the Third Reich. Herr Doktor Klein is an eminent surgeon with three children. As the net begins to tighten on the Jewish community, he refuses to believe it can get any worse. It takes a belated awakening to the brutal truth before he tries to engineer an escape for the whole family. This proves impossible, but he does manage to find a place for his middle child, 15-year-old Rosa, on the Kindertransport, those now famous trains that were allowed to take a limited number of children out of the country. Rosa is despatched to reluctant relatives in England, from where it is hoped she can find work for the rest of the Kleins. Meanwhile, war draws closer, and the prospects of fleeing grow slim. Read the rest of this entry »

Chris Adrian is big in America. As a result of his three novels and a collection of short stories, The New Yorker has named him as one of their prestigious “20 under 40″.

Now, in an attempt to “crash-land him on to the British literary scene”, two of his books are being published simultaneously in the UK: A Better Angel, which contains nine of his short stories, and a novel called The Great Night, a work of magic realism based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

One key to understanding Adrian’s work (The New York Times’s reviewer of The Great Night admitted to feeling “unsure of what has just happened … and why”) is to consider it through a biographical lens. Adrian is a Fellow in Paediatric Haematology-Oncology in San Francisco. He is also a theologian, having studied at Harvard Divinity School. This gives him, as he told The Paris Review recently, “some way to think about the suffering of children that does not make you want to kill yourself”. Accordingly, his writing is almost exclusively concerned with hospitals, dying children, corporeality and existential sorrow, counterpointed with the supernatural and fabulous. The result is a beguiling, troubling and undeniably potent brand of fiction.

Continue reading on the Independent website

Last summer, Michael Briguglio, a sociologist and chairman of the Maltese Green party, opened what may be a new chapter in the history of Malta. Angry that his country was one of only two in the world in which divorce is banned – the other being the Philippines – he sent a formal request to all members of parliament to propose legalising it. After a good deal of political wrangling, a national referendum was announced. As this article was going to press, the people of Malta were about to cast their votes.

Briguglio separated from his wife in 2006, and has long been frustrated that he could not get divorced. He could have gone abroad to do it – Malta bans divorce domestically but recognises it internationally – but this, he says, would have been “prohibitively expensive”. So he is filing for annulment, in which the court rules that one or both parties were not in their right minds at the time of marriage. This is complicated, time-consuming (it can take up to eight years) and costly. It is also psychologically brutal – an annulment suggests that your marriage, with all its memories, was never valid in the first place.

Continue reading on the Guardian website

Malta: Jake Wallis Simons meets the people fighting to legalise divorce — and those trying to keep it outlawed.

Listen to the audio (5 min 17 secs)

“People came in ones and twos until the place was packed. Somebody closed the door to stifle the breeze. Then Father Angelo Seychell — a short, rotund priest in a spotless white robe — glided in, positioned himself beneath the crucifix, and began Mass. The congregation followed the proceedings automatically. But when it came to the sermon, there was an unexpected change . . .” Read the transcript

Damian Barr explains why Jake Wallis Simons won

More about Fiction Uncovered: http://www.fictionuncovered.co.uk/

listen to the audio (12 mins 52 secs) Introduced by David Baddiel

“Buddha vs Buddha”: Jake Wallis Simons describes how an ancient row within Tibetan Buddhism is causing a modern schism, and why it led him to give up Buddhism for good.

Four Thought combines big ideas and evocative storytelling in a series of personal viewpoints – speakers take to the stage ready to air their latest thinking on the trends, ideas, interests and passions that affect our culture and society.

Recorded live at the RSA in London, these talks are unscripted, thought-provoking and entertaining, with a personal dimension.

Patrick deWitt

Turning the final page of The Sisters Brothers, the second novel by the Canadian-born writer Patrick deWitt, the reader comes face-to-face with a mug shot of the author, an angular-jawed young man wearing a deadpan expression.

So this was him, then. He was the creator of this unsettling, compelling and deeply strange picaresque novel.

The Sisters Brothers is one of those books that they call “genre bending”. The story, set against the backdrop of the 1850s Californian gold rush, goes something like this: two gun-toting brothers, Eli and Charlie Sisters, are instructed by their boss, the shadowy “Commodore”, to hunt down and kill a chap by the unlikely name of Hermann Kermit Warm. They embark on a thrills-and-spills adventure across California, encountering a quasi-Beckettian “gallery of moribunds” on the way. The dénouement is at once serendipitous and circular.

Read more on the Independent website

Jake Wallis Simons describes how an ancient row within Tibetan Buddhism is causing a modern schism, and why it led him to give up Buddhism for good.

Four Thought combines big ideas and evocative storytelling in a series of personal viewpoints – speakers take to the stage ready to air their latest thinking on the trends, ideas, interests and passions that affect our culture and society.

Recorded live at the RSA in London, these talks are unscripted, thought-provoking and entertaining, with a personal dimension.

More information