Rediscovered – WORD CHASE with Adair V

July 13, 2018July 11, 2018Adair V

Last Letter (by Ted Hughes)

Last Letter What happened that night? Your final night. Double, treble exposure Over everything. Late afternoon, Friday, My last sight of you alive. Burning your letter to me, in the ashtray, With that strange smile. Had I bungled your plan? Had it surprised me sooner than you purposed? Had I rushed it back to […]

March 13, 2014June 2, 2018Adair V

In search of elsewhere in literature

Elsewhere is what’s happening on the next block while you await a lover. Elsewhere is arrived at in a split second through curiosity. Elsewhere is an ideal or the event you happen to witness or the life you might have led. Depending on the story, elsewhere is madness, a longing for the past, or the world that is left behind.

July 17, 2012June 2, 2018Adair V

Auto-da-fé: Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress ends with a conflagration of Western masterpieces. Father Goriot, Edmund Dantes, Quasimodo, Esmeralda, Emma Bovary and many, many others are condemned as ‘heretics’ and burned. Dai Sijie’s enchanting, slim, fable-like novel centres around the ‘re-education’ of two teenage friends during Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

June 29, 2012June 1, 2018Adair V

James Joyce and the detritus of reality…

Joyce was a nomad. He was born in 1882, in Rathgar, a suburb of Dublin, and grew up the oldest of ten surviving children. After he started school, his family changed houses nine times in eleven years, an itinerancy not always undertaken by choice. They sometimes moved, with their shrinking stock of possessions, at night, in order to escape the attention of creditors. They did not leave a forwarding address…

February 27, 2012June 1, 2018Adair V

Vladimir Nabokov & Lionel Trilling discuss ‘Lolita’

Watch these clips from the 1950s show “Close Up” in which Nabokov tells how he enjoyed breeding Lolita “in his own laboratory” and refers to the novel as “a fruit salad”.

January 1, 2012June 1, 2018Adair V

Illness, slow time, and the lost art of letter writing

I didn’t need an answer to feel a real connection with the people I loved. It was enough to give them something of myself in a dashed off postcard or a crammed aerogramme or lengthy descriptions of my daily life on several pages of onion skin paper.

November 8, 2011June 2, 2018Adair V

Lost in a blue cupboard

The lost war diaries of Marguerite Duras and how blogging makes this impossible today…

July 4, 2011June 2, 2018Adair V

The Invention of George Eliot, Part IV: Marriage

How should George Eliot’s marriage to John Cross be read? Her various biographers offer a range of interpretations. Haight interprets it straightforwardly, as an act of sincere affection. Bodenheimer reads her marriage to Cross as a pragmatic, but also essentially conservative, step. Redlinger proposes that she married from “a fear of losing her power to love”. . . .

May 29, 2011June 1, 2018Adair V

In search of grass in literature

The image–and the idea!–of grass is connected to literature in a variety of ways, from the pages we write on to a symbol of innocence to a metaphor for how we connect and sometimes how we don’t.

May 5, 2011June 1, 2018Adair V

The Invention of George Eliot, Part III: Birth of a Persona

George Eliot did not exist before 1857. She and her lover George Lewes administered her fame throughout her life. Before her death she sought a way for this administration to continue.