The vacationers book review

0 Have your say This is a truly dazzling collection of short stories. Freud used the word unheimlich, which is usually translated as “uncanny”, although if you break down the German word, “un-home-like” is a better fit. Over nine stories, Julia Armfield makes the home a place not of safety and comfort, but a discomfiting, weird space. The poet Emily Dickinson once wrote “you need not be a chamber to be haunted”, and Armfield’s exceptional collection seems to have taken that to heart and heartlessness.This is an artfully confected collection. There are themes that run through each story – a prioritisation of the female voice, the home which is no longer a home, right down to specific images such as tangerines, skin diseases, absent fathers and an odd fearfulness about tooth loss. It is like a string quartet with an idea put forward, twisted around, brought back and set as variations of itself. It reminded me of … [Read more...] about Book review: salt slow, by Julia Armfield

0 Have your say The Doll Factory scarcely needs a review. It is already a success and, according to its publishers, is “the most coveted debut of 2019, an intoxicating story of art, obsession and possession.” Elizabeth Macneal is a graduate of the creative writing course at the University of East Anglia where she was the Malcolm Bradbury Scholar, and The Doll Factory has won her the Caledonia Novel Award and has been sold to “28 territories so far,” while TV rights “have already been snapped up.” I’m not surprised. Who could resist a story of “art, obsession and possession” beginning in London in 1850 as the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park is being prepared, and offering an agreeable mixture of glamour and squalor, inviting – and receiving – the adjective “Dickensian”? The cast-list is headed by a (slightly) disabled girl, who works alongside her pock-marked sister in the doll factory of … [Read more...] about Book review: The Doll Factory, by Elizabeth Macneal

0 Have your say Biography is a peculiarly flexible form. On the one hand we have, say, Michael Holroyd’s magisterial work on George Bernard Shaw, at a staggering 1,452 pages. On the other, we have incisive little sketches, such as Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, cramming four lives into 332 pages. One form almost fetishises detail, the other proclaims iconoclasm. This book sits between the two. There are things that I learned and things that I had no concern in learning. Do I really need to know that John Buchan’s Borders drawl meant that his secretary confused “Countess of Ayr” with “County Surveyor,” or that Lord Ebury and Dr Walford Davies attended Buchan’s wedding, where the Allegro in C from a serenade composed by the bride’s father was played? Or that the bride herself wore a “white stiff satin gown, with a fichu bodice and kimono sleeves of embroidered chiffon, made for her by the voguish … [Read more...] about Book review: Beyond The Thirty-Nine Steps

0 Have your say Kate Clanchy is a poet, teacher, novelist and journalist, Scottish by birth, with an English father and Irish (Catholic) name: Edinburgh school, Oxford University. She taught briefly in Scotland, left after writing an article in The Scotsman which was critical of the GTC’s registration policy. Since then she has taught in England, first in Essex, and for the last nine years she has been writer-in-residence at Oxford Spires Academy. She has worked mostly with children from immigrant families, many refugees, and with others from white unemployed working-class backgrounds. After more than 30 years she still loves teaching and believes in the redemptive power of education, and especially of poetry and English literature. As the title suggests, this book is rich in personal stories about the kids she has taught – all names are disguised – and what she has learned from them. The stories are fascinating, many extraordinary. They give a … [Read more...] about Book review: Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, by Kate Clanchy