The Hothouse by the East River

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Muriel Spark

It’s been a long time since I read any Muriel Spark, so I had forgotten just how weird she can be. But even if I’d remembered, I doubt I would have been prepared for the sheer outrageous weirdness of The Hothouse by the East River.

The Fashion in Shrouds

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Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham

It was pure chance that made me pick The Fashion in Shrouds by Margery Allingham off the shelf so soon after reading Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers. But that chance led me to read Allingham’s 1938 novel as in some way a response to Sayers’s 1935 novel.

Swift’s Atonement

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Graham Swift, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Martin Amis, Pat Barker, William Boyd

Of that generation of mainstream writers who were brought to prominence by the first of Granta‘s Best Young Writers promotions, I steadily lost interest in most of them over the years. Amis fils fell away after just a couple of books, I managed four by Pat Barker before losing interest, it was pretty much the same with Julian Barnes, and the last few novels by Ian McEwan were so dull that the most recent has been sitting on my to-be-read pile for a couple of years without me ever feeling like opening it. Only William Boyd and Graham Swift have, for rather different reasons, stayed the course: I enjoy the historical sweep of Boyd’s novels at his best, and the narrow focus of Swift’s at his best.

The Innocence of Museums

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Orhan Pamuk

I have a somewhat ambiguous relationship to the work of Orhan Pamuk. I have read only two of his novels: My Name is Red, which I loved, and Snow, which I really struggled with. But we have all of his books because Maureen loves them.

Which is a way of saying that I have not read The Museum of Innocence. Nor have I been to Istanbul (much as I would love to do so), and so I have not visited the Museum of Innocence that Pamuk set up with the money from his Nobel Prize, though I have flicked through the book about the museum that Pamuk produced a few years back. (As I write this, an exhibition related to the Museum of Innocence is on in London; we are intending to go, but have not done so yet.) I therefore approached Innocence of Memories in a state of, yes, innocence.

All the World’s a Stage

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Alan Rickman, Gemma Lawrence, Joe Banister, Ken Nwosu, Leo Wringer, Leon Annor, Mark Benton, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Patrick Godfrey, Patsy Ferran, Paul Chahidi, Philip Arditti, Rosalie Craig, Siobhan McSweeney, William Shakespeare

One of the things that Shakespeare did throughout his career was draw attention to the very theatricality of his plays. Think of the role of Chorus in Henry V, or the play within a play that is The Taming of the Shrew. As You Like It is very much of the same company; it is, after all, the play in which Jacques delivers his famous speech beginning “All the world’s a stage …”. Given that, therefore, it is well worth giving serious attention to how the play is staged.

Web site

Just spent the last week and a bit fossicking about with my web site. I’ve done it through Squarespace, which is a joy to use, and the results can now be viewed at the usual address:

www.paulkincaid.co.uk

or

www.paulkincaid.com

I think this looks so much cleaner and sharper than the last version.

The Prestige

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Christopher Nolan, Christopher Priest, Jonathan Nolan

This is the last of my essays about film adaptation, and inevitably it is about the Nolan Brothers’s film of Christopher Priest’s novel of The Prestige.

Reprint: Why Aren’t They Here?

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Aristotle, Carl Sagan, Galileo Galilei, Giordano Bruno, Johannes Kepler, Nicholas Copernicus, Orson Welles, Rene Descartes, Surendra Verma, Voltaire

I don’t review many books about science, but every so often some popular science book finds its way onto my desk. This one, Why Aren’t They Here? The Question of Life on Other Worlds by Surendra Verma was reviewed in Vector 257, Autumn 2008.

Reprint: Osama

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Bruce Springsteen, Don DeLillo, Lavie Tidhar

I finish the week with this review of Lavie Tidhar’s Osama. The review first appeared in Bull Spec 7 (Spring 2012).

Reprint: Space

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Arthur C Clarke, Cyrano de Bergerac, Douglas Adams, E.E. 'Doc' Smith, Fred Hoyle, H.G. Wells, Hal Clement, Hugo Gernsback, Iain Banks, James Blish, James Tiptree Jr, Johannes Kepler, John W. Campbell, Jules Verne, Larry Niven, Poul Anderson

This is another of my Cognitive Mapping columns. In this instance it first appeared in Vector 190 (November-December 1996).