-
Having been ill for a number of weeks - the dreaded flu, bad cough, aching bones - I have read little, written less and slept more than ever. I did read a wonderful novel, though: David Vann's Legend of a Suicide. I have little I want to say about it now: and I have reviewed it on my other blog: but wanted to say it's a novel that has gotten me thinking. If you love good fiction, then please do read this wonderfully moving piece. I'll stop by when I've processed my thoughts.

Comments

  1. Sandra11 December 2009 at 00:05

    synchronicity... 'stumbled' here from Nathan Bransford's blog, and what book did I start reading a couple of hours ago? Legend of a Suicide.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Lighthouse: A Review

-
Image
In the next of my posts about Man Booker Prize long-listed novels in 2012, I turn now to:  Alison Moore is a debut novelist, whose first novel, The Lighthouse, has been receiving rave reviews – and a lot of press attention for its small publisher, Salt – following its long-listing in the 2012 Man Booker Prize.   The book, winningly presented, comes adorned with praise from the likes of Margaret Drabble and Jenn Ashworth.   It is, then, difficult to come to this work without expecting rather a lot of it. A middle-aged man, recently separated, has come to Germany to walk part of the Rhine.   Futh’s life has not gone well – he has little to show for it, and he rarely makes an impression.   As he sets out on his walking holiday he begins to reminisce on the things that have gone wrong.   In a parallel storyline, hotelier Ester is becoming increasingly restless in her marriage to Bernard, a violent man who is drifting apart from his wife, and s...
Read more

Music & The Creative Act

-
So yesterday I continued working on the most difficult pages of my new novel, Grass and Ember, a particularly harrowing four chapter arc that ends one characters story and propels the reader into the final third of the novel. I've been working slowly on these pages, as it seems each word needs to be precise, more precise than I usually go for. I like my prose to have looseness, almost like a conversation, but this needed the exactness of poetry, it needed to sing. Now when I write I mostly do it in silence. I loathe distraction when I'm writing because I like to lose myself in the work. I see sentences rising up, a symphony of words, and a distraction can cause all those words to come tumbling down, and my reconstruction of them never feels as solid as the first elusive thought I saw. However, launching into this four chapter arc I found my resistance was up, I simply did not want to go there and write them, to think what my character would have to think for this sequence ...
Read more

The Two Faces of Alfred Hitchcock

-
Image
The Two Faces of Alfred Hitchcock Hitchcock (2012) Dir. Sacha Gervasi The Girl (2012) Dir. Julian Jarrold --- Please note that these reviews contain discussion of major plot points of both films and so should be considered spoiler heavy. --- Alfred Hitchcock was notoriously difficult with women.   The sound tests he made with Anny Ondra for the 1929 film Blackmail see him quizzing her about her sex life.   Just under a decade later, he maximised discomfort for Madeleine Carroll on The 39 Steps by handcuffing her to co-star Robert Donat.   Such incidents were presented as part of Hitchcock’s playful nature; they fit with the man known for directing such suspenseful pictures with tongue firmly in cheek. When Hitch decamped to Hollywood in 1940 he was already an international star, and the studio system wanted some of that glory for themselves.   He made three pictures with super-producer David O. Selznick, and Selznick kept loaning him out to oth...
Read more