Déjà-Vu: Author's Portrait of Jens Peter Jacobsen

On the occasion of his death today 131 years ago:

As regards literature, Northern Europe has been fertile ground ever since the old Norse sagas were written down, notably the Icelandic Edda. The fact that fifteen authors from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature between 1901 and 2013 tells of a vivid narrative tradition. In fact, the names of Scandinavians can be found on bestseller lists regularly, but of course there are important classical writers from the region, too. Every bibliophile will at least have heard of Knut Hamsun, Henrik Ibsen, Selma Lagerlöf, August Strindberg, and Sigrid Undset – to name just a few –, but how about Jens Peter Jacobsen, a late contemporary and fellow-countryman of Hans Christian Andersen?

Read more »

Poetry Revisited: The Face of All the World by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The Face of All the World

(from Sonnets from the Portuguese: 1850)

The face of all the world is changed, I think,
Since first I heard the footsteps of thy soul
Move still, oh, still, beside me, as they stole
Betwixt me and the dreadful outer brink
Of obvious death, where I, who thought to sink,
Was caught up into love, and taught the whole
Of life in a new rhythm. The cup of dole
God gave for baptism, I am fain to drink,
And praise its sweetness, Sweet, with thee anear.
The names of country, heaven, are changed away
For where thou art or shalt be, there or here;
And this … this lute and song … loved yesterday,
(The singing angels know) are only dear
Because thy name moves right in what they say.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)
English poet

Book Review: Abel Sanchez and Other Stories by Miguel de Unamuno

2016 review of a book written

by an author whose family name starts with the letter

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

It is often said that life is suffering and this is certainly true because our bodies are vulnerable, not to say mortal, and our minds use to be overflowing with desires, many of them such that can never be fulfilled. Pain is the inevitable consequence, but the big question is how we cope with it. At the heart of all three works assembled in Abel Sanchez and Other Stories by Miguel de Unamuno are suffering souls, be it that of a man unable to stop envying his best friend Abel who is almost like a twin brother to him, be it a physician who sees that his innovative talent as a writer isn’t recognised and slowly ruins his practice, be it the charitable village priest who knows how important religion is for his people and never gets tired of preaching the Catholic creed although he himself has long ceased to believe.

Voltaire on Fanaticism

Yesterday, on 22 March 2016, jihadist suicide bombers took action in Belgium killing dozens of people at Brussels Airport in Zaventem and in the underground near important EU buildings where one of my friends was working in her office at the time. As we know by now, fanatics like them use to invoke the Qur’an to justify the indiscriminate slaughtering of passersby, but I’m sure that theirs is a rather distorted interpretation of the words of the Holy Prophet Muhammad and that the vast majority of Muslims worldwide will disagree with it because the true message of Islam – as of most religions – is PEACE.

We call jihadists fanatics. But what does this mean? What is fanaticism after all?

Poetry Revisited: The Rain and the Wind by William Ernest Henley

The Rain and the Wind

(from Hawthorn and Lavender, with Other Verses: 1901)

The rain and the wind, the wind and the rain --
They are with us like a disease:
They worry the heart, they work the brain,
As they shoulder and clutch at the shrieking pane,
And savage the helpless trees.

What does it profit a man to know
These tattered and tumbling skies
A million stately stars will show,
And the ruining grace of the after-glow
And the rush of the wild sunrise?

Ever the rain -- the rain and the wind!
Come, hunch with me over the fire,
Dream of the dreams that leered and grinned,
Ere the blood of the Year got chilled and thinned,
And the death came on desire!

William Ernest Henley (1849-1903)
English poet, critic and editor

Book Review: Owls Do Cry by Janet Frame

2016 review of a book written

by an author whose family name starts with the letter

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Rubbish dumps as (forbidden) playing grounds for children and mental institutions as homes for people considered for one reason or another to be unfit for taking equal part in society are a sad reality that most of us prefer not to think about. Thus it’s understandable that they aren’t among the favourite places of writers to use as setting for the main plot or a central scene of a book, but if sought for they can yet be found in literature. An example for a novel featuring both as important elements of the story is Owls Do Cry by Janet Frame, a satire on a New Zealand childhood in the boom years after World War II drawn from the author’s own experience. Confronted from an early age with all kinds of problems implied in working-class poverty, with illness and death, each of the Withers children takes another way out of misery.

Back Reviews Reel: March 2013

March 2013 has been a very productive blogging month. Among other posts I published altogether five reviews, three of contemporary novels and two of well-remembered classics. Two of the books are from the pen of women writers, namely an early novel by the French writer Simone de Beauvoir and an Italian bestseller by Susanna Tamaro. The others were written by men and comprise a much acclaimed collection of short stories by James Joyce and two fictionalised double biographies by Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature, and by German-Austrian author Daniel Kehlmann respectively.