Year of the Monkey : Patti Smith

Chinese New Year in 2016 brought in the Year of the Monkey and for Patti Smith it was a hard year. She turned seventy, her close friend Sandy Pearlman (music producer, professor and songwriter) had a stroke and lay unconscious for six months before dying of pneumonia, and her close friend Sam Shephard,  (actor, playwright, and director) suffering from ALS (a degenerative disease) had only a little time to live. And then there was the election result!

Claire Keegan: Small Things Like These

A House-Boat on the Styx : John Kendrick Bangs

John Kendrick Bangs was an American author writing comic fiction between the years of 1895 and 1922. The term ‘Bangsian Fantasy’ is derived from his work and relates to fantasy fiction about famous people in the afterlife. This particular tale has a heterogenous group among the shades, which includes Shakespeare, Confucius, Johnson, Boswell and Baron Munchausen among others. As you would imagine they have lively discussions. There is something of the atmosphere of a gentleman’s club, where the men (for there are no women in this version of Hades) continue to behave as they did in life. Baron Munchausen tells huge lies and is aggrieved when no-one believes him. Bacon and Shakespeare are at odds over the authorship of Hamlet, Johnson rehearses his bon mots and has Boswell with pen poised waiting to capture them.

David Garnett: Lady Into Fox

Homesick : Jennifer Croft

Homesick is a popular title for a book. We have recently reviewed a book of the same name by Catrina Davies which concerns her search for a safe place to live. Then there are other books of the same name by Eshkol Neve, Marc Raabe, Jenny Lauren and Kate Klise, and several titled Homesickness by Colin Barrett, Janine Mikosza, and Murray Bail. Many of the books have been written in languages other than English and concern migration and the loss of home. Croft’s book is different in that it was written by the author in both Spanish under the title of Serpentes y Escaleras (Snakes and Ladders) and in English as Homesick.

Mourning Problems

Congratulations! Annie Erneaux

Congratulations to Annie Erneaux, winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature ‘for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory’

We repost below our review of her 2017 work The Years

Adrian McKinty: Police At The Station And They Don’t Look Friendly

Yell, Sam, If You Still Can : Maylis Besserie

Oh no, I hear you cry, not another book about someone ending their days in an aged care home?

Yes, I’m afraid so, but the subject in this case is the last days of Samuel Beckett. Not your usual old age pensioner. A man whose  Nobel prize was awarded for novels and drama in which, ‘ the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation’ and who takes a fairly dark view of himself and his life.