Archive for the ‘The Independent on Sunday’ Category
Review: Out of It, By Selma Dabbagh (from the Independent on Sunday)
December 3rd, 2011
At first glance, Out Of It, a debut novel by the short story writer Selma Dabbagh, seems – stylistically – more easy reading than literary fiction. It is set aside, however, by the weight of the material: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (Or rather, the Palestinian side of it.)
The story centres around a pair of twentysomething boy-and-girl twins, Iman and Rashid. We first meet them in Gaza in the midst of an Israeli barrage (although the precise details of place and political context are curiously obscured). Rashid is excited that he has won a scholarship to London, giving him the opportunity to finally get “out of it”. Iman, meanwhile, traumatised by the death of a friend, resolves to take a more active role in the hostilities. Read more on the Independent website
The grief of child mortality, and the wonder of faeries in San Francisco (from the Independent on Sunday)
May 29th, 2011
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.
“Bring me the head of Kermit Warm”; a review of “The Sisters Brothers” by Patrick deWitt (from the Independent on Sunday)
May 16th, 2011
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.
Oliver James: it’s all about you (from the Independent on Sunday)
May 30th, 2010
Oliver James: "powered by a nuclear rage"
On my way out of the bathroom of a café in South Kensington, I collide with an unusual-looking man. There is something of the artist about him. He is wearing a flamboyant silk scarf and a capacious greatcoat, and peers through his spectacles like a character from a wartime spy novel. We make our apologies and I find my way to the corner of the café to wait for Oliver James, the esteemed clinical psychologist and broadcaster, author of such iconic books as They F*** You Up, Britain on the Couch and Affluenza. After a couple of minutes, I realise I have just met him.
James removes his flamboyant scarf and coat and sits down opposite me, taking a nicotine tablet. “I’ve just had the photoshoot,” he says, “I wonder if they’ve made me look horrible.” I make reassuring noises to the effect that they’ve not. “Do you have children yourself?” he asks. I tell him I have three: a two-year-old and nine-month-old twins. He looks at me in surprise. “Fuck,” exclaims the clinical psychologist.
James’ new book, How Not to F*** Them Up – the follow-on to his cult classic They F*** You Up – is a psychological guide to parenting. Unlike other books of this sort, How Not to F*** Them Up focuses on the wellbeing of the parent as a starting point for meeting the needs of the child. In reality, James argues, the happiness of the parent is “what will ultimately decide whether your child has a fruitful, sane life”. And sorting out your own wellbeing is not always easy. As he puts it, “The real challenge of parenthood is you, not your child.” Read the rest of this entry »
