Jennifer Croft : The Extinction of Irena Rey

Eight translators make their seventh pilgrimage five miles to the Belarusian border to the home of the woman they refer to as Our Author. The translators are known by their languages: Serbian, Slovenian, English, and the narrator Spanish. Swedish is new, taking the place of Czech who, they are told, has died.

Helen DeWitt : The English Understand Wool

New Directions Press has a new series, Storybook ND, a series of novellas that aim to ‘Deliver the pleasure one felt as a child reading a marvelous book from cover to cover in an afternoon.’  They include a number of authors including Rachel Ingalls, Natalia Ginzberg, Laszlo Krasznahorkai, and the one I read, Helen DeWitt.

Frauds/freuds 9: The Irish Professor

My Father’s Guru : Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

 

Jeffrey Masson’s father’s guru PB Brunton, known in the family as PB, unlike Sri  Ramakrishna, was not given to ecstatic fits or animal possession. A small neat man with a pointed beard he inspired the devotion of Masson’s father Jacques and his uncle Bernard without performing any spectacular feats.

The Madman’s Library

“It was all too easy,” he said. “It all went too smoothly. America, you sit there, you plump beauty, still buying neckties from sidewalk sharpies, still guessing which walnut shell contains the pea… America, I sometimes worry about you.”

Roast swan with green mashed potatoes

If, like Gert, you love big personalities with a sizeable helping of the fraud or impostor, you’ll enjoy this article by Edward White in The Paris Review about Fanny Cradock, the face and voice of cooking on British television from the mid-’50s to the mid-’70s [who was] once described by one national newspaper as “a preposterous character, the foodie you loved to loathe.” She actually wasn’t much of a cook – mincemeat omelette, anyone? – but she was an excellent self-promoter, a brand before the time when celebrities were brands.

Frauds/freuds 8: the ‘Very Reverend’ Robert Parkin Peters

A damned talented elephant

The Path of Pollen or Frauds (freuds) 7

 

Lately we’re picking up a great deal of consternation in the media about bees, or the lack of them. Unrestrained use of fertilisers in the USA has killed off many of these essential pollinators, and now some canny operators are hiring out mobile bee-pollinating units and driving from one end of the country to the other with them.

The Little Red Chairs-Edna O’Brien

‘Edna O’Brien was the first Irish woman to have sex,’ says Anne Enright in her Guardian review of O’Brien’s 2011 novel, The Light of Evening. She goes on to say for Irish women of that time, 1960, sex was mostly about having children.