David Thomson says when speaking of Hitchcock, “I think that he approached filmmaking as a way of looking at women he couldn’t have — which is not that far from the way millions of people have always gone to the movies.” (Los Angeles Review of Books) Thomson wouldn’t be entirely wrong but he is surely only very partially correct. Is the looking we enjoy when going to …
Let us open this essay which ostensibly focuses upon Spring Flowers, Spring Frost, but that will range broadly over Ismail Kadare’s work, with an anecdote Kadare offers. It was during the communist era, and “I heard at one point that there were a number of suicides amongst army officers and I got very interested in that. I asked one of my cousins who was an officer whether it was true …
1 When speaking to a friend last week, he discussed how a former colleague of ours, who I hadn’t seen since he moved back to Brighton five years ago, had offered the woman that he is now married to an engagement ring by way of forgiveness. The friend said that she did forgive him but maybe it rested on her cheating on him too — it was indeed going to be a marriage based on mutual incri…
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…