read this book

Rather than writing, David Constantine seems to perform an act of visualisation on the reader’s behalf; what he makes us see is matter-of-fact but at the same time somehow light, unmoored and thoroughly poetic. His stories are evidence. Everyone in them is a witness, sometimes to a death, more often to a birth; sometimes, to [...]

the booklover angle

My boredom benchmark for Euro-Lit mysteries in which the writing, translation, publishing, selling & curating of books is cleverly interwoven with philosophical puzzles, mild sex & Real History, is Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier, a novel in which almost nothing happens except book-chat, & of which Isabel Allende said, “A treat for the [...]

short & sad

Somebody landed here today after Googling “describe yourself in a single phrase”. Mine would be: five feet six inches tall.
Reading Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics. Good stuff, but I think a better source of epigrams for the new novel would be Adam Thorpe’s Hodd, which has this: “…a shrieking was heard under the grass [...]

truelove’s gutter

There’s no such thing as character, D says. There’s only behaviour. We’re memes but we’re careful not to admit it–so careful with one another! That shouldn’t be taken, he’s quick to add, to mean that we exist in some state aside from materiality. We’re subject to material forces but won’t allow ourselves to see that [...]

depaysment

September, the month of re-reading.
What can be recovered of “Ursula” from T Behrens’ oddly unsatisfying memoir of her ? He erases her identity so carefully that she has no substance except as his brother’s lover, anima & nemesis–existing, in fact, only as an exotic accessory to, or ravager of, the Behrens family life. He claims, [...]

note made in a hotel bar, 1991

However dark it gets outside, the window is an imperfect mirror. Through it you can just see the billowing exhaust smoke of cars stopped at the junction, pedestrians in winter coats.
I’m waiting for someone. I’m reading the Gunn & Guyomard introduction to A Young Girl’s Diary– “Why from the moment one feels desire is there [...]

ghost of a ghost

It’s rare that being an HE Bates obsessive born in Warwickshire is of any use in the wider world: but it enabled me to add my tuppenceworth, some months late & somewhat oblique to the point, to this excellent discussion of Sarah Waters’ Booker-shortlisted “ghost story” The Little Stranger.

an imaginary review (6)

A clear & useful bridge between science and the public is constructed in this empathic literary novel of a boy & how he comes to terms with his world. Explanations of everything from black holes to epigenesis demonstrate the author’s engagement with the scientific worldview, & act as the pivots of metaphors for a full [...]

sf retrospective

Stan Robinson’s spectacular at New Scientist is a mini-magazine of the 1980s, including a polemic by Stan himself, reviews & futurological speculations by everyone from Ian Watson to Gwyneth Jones, & flash fiction by many of the core authors of Brit SF. There’s even a review of Margaret Atwood. Very satisfying, although I could have [...]

strange bedfellows episode 6: n to p

Further scandals, intellectual, linguistic & sexual, from my stripped-down shelves. Not long to go now, then we can all forget what turned out to be, like the best efforts of sf writers from time immemorial, more notion than content: the idea that should have stayed an idea.
Eric Newby
Anais Nin
Cees Nooteboom
Sean O’Brien
Heinz R Pagels
Elaine Pagels
Chuck Pahlaniuk
Kenneth [...]