Anas’s Blog

Here’s a review of Mansfield’s The Garden Party I wrote a while back. I’ve made a few corrections to it: 

Recently, I got a bit caught up reading The Garden Party, a collection of Edwardian author Katherine Mansfield’s short stories. First off, I liked her name. It seems strangely familiar at first, but that’s largely due to the fact that it’s an amalgam of the names of screen goddesses Katherine Hepburn and Jayne Mansfield. Anyway, Mansfield who was born in 1888 and died tragically young in 1923, was an extremely gifted writer who grew up in New Zealand but eventually moved to Britain — I don’t suppose there was much going on in New Zealand at that time or whether there is even now. She’s strongly associated with the modernist movement in literature and as the author biog at the front of my shiny new Penguin edition explains she was quite happy to label herself a modernist; it’s not a label that later critics would awkwardly try to shoehorn her into. The modernists to explain briefly, were an iconoclastic literary movement who felt themselves duty-bound to free literature from such outmoded notions as plot, storyline, the conventions of narrative and of grammar: they were unconventional. You’ve heard the usual roll call of names from the early 20th century — Joyce, Pound, Woolf, Elliot, etc. — and if you haven’t you really ought to read more.

Read the rest of this entry »

Over the past couple of years I’ve started to become very excited by literature and I can pinpoint this new found passion to first reading Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground.

Before that I would read a novel by some great writer, and although I might find it engrossing, enjoying and appreciating it on different levels, I was never gripped or enflamed by the writing – not in the same way as I might be about a great piece of music. Which meant that I would still feel some kind of distance to the work and rarely an immediate sense of connection, so that literature never really lived for me. Until that is, I read Notes and, it seems cliched to say, but yes, my mind really was awakened to the possibilities, the extremes of consciousness and the different kinds of truths and contradictions that a truly great writer could communicate through the form of the novel or short story.  But Dostoevsky was an alchemist, some kind of great seer, and he was fearless about putting grotesque, ugly things in his books and challenging the reader without — and this for me is one of his great achievements —  falling into a kind of dauntingly relentless grimness. Most of all, through his fearlessness he got at the truth about human relationships and about just how fucked up we are, and that’s why we still revere him today.  So, I never thought I’d be lucky enough to find another writer with whom I felt such an affinity, whose courage and spirit I was so in awe of. 

But I have. A few weeks ago I picked up Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I was expecting to be impressed by the writing — I knew by reputation that he was a superb prose stylist – and I was and am blown away utterly by the poetry and the sparkle of his sentences; but more about that later. However I didn’t think I would find a writer with such an insight into the human soul, who was like Dostoevsky a master psychologist in addition to being master at his craft – and I certainly didn’t think I’d find this in a writer whose subject matter was exclusively the dazzling lives of wealthy Americans.

Read the rest of this entry »

WARNING: I give away important plot details in what follows.

‘What constituted the turbulence of our time and what transition it was we were passing through I don’t know, nor I think does anyone, unless it were some of those visitors of ours. Yet the most worthless fellows suddenly gained predominant influence, began loudly criticising everything is sacred, though till then they had not dared to open their mouths, while the leading people, who had till then so satisfactorily kept the upper hand, began listening to them and holding their peace; some even simpered approval in the most shameless way.’

Read the rest of this entry »

Writer Kurt Vonnegut dies at 84

Another great man passes on…I came to Vonnegut late on, but when I did discover Slaughterhouse 5 what a fucking revelation!

Reflecting about that moment afterwards, now in a condition of health, he often told himself: that after all, those gleams and lightning flashes of higher self perception and self-awareness and consequently of ‘higher existence’ were nothing but an illness, a violation of the normal condition, and, if that were so, then it was not higher existence at all, but, on the contrary, must be reckoned among the very lowest. And yet he reached, at last, an exceedingly paradoxical conclusion: ‘What does it matter if it’s an illness, then?’ he decided, at last,’ what does it matter that it’s an abnormal tension, if the result itself, if the moment of sensation, recalled and examined in a condition of health, turns out to be the highest degree of harmony and beauty, yields a hitherto unheard of and undreamed of sense of completeness, proportion, reconciliation and an ecstatic, prayerful fusion with the highest synthesis of life’, of that he could be in no doubt, nor could he allow any doubts. Read the rest of this entry »