mulberry road

13:56 22nd Apr 2012

Foal's Bread by Gillian Mears – review | Books | The Observer

A short review in the Guardian on the UK release of Foal’s Bread.
(My review for The Ember is here.)

14:59 26th Jan 2012

Notes: 1

Mrs Winterson continued to have an effect on life choices far removed from her own experience: ‘She hated the small and the mean, and yet that is all she had. I bought a few big houses myself along the way, simply because I was trying out something for her. In fact, my tastes are more modest – but you don’t know that until you have bought and sold for the ghost of your mother.’

—

Rather tough essay-review on Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? This quote happens to be something I rather sympathise with, even consider it to be something my own family members do.

Sure, Winterson may be a bit larger than life, but some of her experiences are not that unusual, surely. Mars-Jones’ essay is perceptive, but borders on harsh for the most part.

Adam Mars-Jones, LRB 26.

14:55

Notes: 1

Tags: reviews

Friendship is so important that in English, even before the rise of Facebook, the word friend was spoken and written more than any other relational term, including mother or father.

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You’ve got to have friends | Inside Story

Anna Cristina Pertierra reviewed three books on friendship, on and offline, for Inside Story earlier this year.

Tags: reading reviews

The Country and the City

lareviewofbooks:

KATE MERKEL-HESS on two new histories of rural China

and MAURA ELIZABETH CUNNINGHAM on Hong Kong’s Chungking Mansions
Empty Stools of Rural Village Life in China (Xinhua) from All-China Women’s Federation http://bit.ly/nF7Ack
KATE MERKEL-HESS
Gail Hershatter
The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past
University of California Press, August 2011. 472 pp.

Jacob Eyferth
Eating Rice from Bamboo Roots: The Social History of a Community of Handicraft Papermakers in Rural Sichuan, 1920-2000
Harvard University Asia Center, 2009. 335 pp.

Until recently, “China” brought to mind for most Americans farms, farmers, and the rural countryside, not the factories and mass industrialization we think of today. This view of a more rural China is what also once dominated the most widely read books about the country, from the hardworking impoverished villagers of Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth, to the rural rebels of journalist Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China. It’s easy to forget about the rural facets of this populous nation in the midst of its freeways and fast trains, skyscrapers and construction sites. This isn’t surprising, since China has more urban centers of a million-plus residents than any other country on earth and, for the first time in its history, as many people living in cities as in villages. Last year, Chinese scholars predicted that its rural population would halve by 2030, from today’s 900 million to 400 million. Meanwhile, the gap between wealthy urban areas and their poor rural counterparts grows ever wider: 99 percent of China’s most impoverished citizens hail from the countryside.

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(Source: lareviewofbooks)

This polyphonic book has different voices for the stages of Byatt’s life and the phases of the world’s history. Childhood is recreated in a tone of naive wonder: a “glossy parliament” of rooks in the treetops, the bud of a poppy with its “secret, scarlet, creased and frilly flower-flesh”. When the myth takes over, Byatt adopts a voice that is entranced and oracular, like a witch reciting spells or one of the Norns who recall the beginning and foresee the end in Götterdämmerung. The epilogue, consulting scientists to establish the contemporary relevance of Ragnarok, settles down into a cooler, wintrier, more academic manner, as if she had both used up her reserves of infantile delight and retired from her commanding role as a fabulist.

The three voices match Byatt’s belief that writing a book is a three-dimensional activity, an exercise, as she once said, in “making a thing”. What she has made in this case – thanks to a rare fusion of imagination and intellect, sensual poetry and cerebral prose, youthful joy and elderly wisdom – is an entire world, compressed but energetically alive in all its details. When we have artists like this, who needs gods?

— Ragnarok: The End of the Gods by AS Byatt – review by Peter Conrad.