To understand Jean Renoir is to comprehend something of cinema’s relationship with realism, but also its relationship to humanity. In cinema the two words often come together even if they may need a little bit of unpacking — words so laden with assumption cannot be left unqualified. Realism in film, after all, was a position sought after rather than assumed and humanity can mean no mor…
Rather than looking at Joao Ubaldo Ribeiro’s body of work, rather even than looking at one or two books in detail, let us instead understand an aspect of the writer’s sensibility through attending to a small number of his characters. We can think of five from his massive An Invincible Memory, but also the central figure in The House of the Fortunate Buddhas, and the boy in the short st…
1 I would never know either of them but each day for a week I saw them at the sea, strangers moving towards a tentative affair. He was as restless as she was desultory and each afternoon when I arrived she was already there, lying against a rock, her skin brown as a walnut, the tan-line like the part bitten into, paler. He often arrived later in the afternoon, hectically passing along the narrow p…
Of course, US literature is rich, a pun playing on the idea that the country is prosperous and the literature is manifold. But we offer it not only as a pun but as a causal relation. The literature is rich partly because the country happens to be also. Few would be likely to claim that 19th century American literature could be seen as so significant as English, French or Russian fiction, but in th…