This book came into my life at a moment when I was struggling with my own identity as a woman writing a memoir about death, relationships, love, and the problem of forgiveness.
Ernaux is a French author little known in the English-speaking world. She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022. I had already read The Years but went to her other writing. Her whole body of work is strangely compelling, distinctive, and unusual, almost constituting a genre of its own.
I love how she allows the everyday world to intersect with memories and impressions, painful and illuminating, almost like a pastiche. She writes about time and generations, linking the collective life of her era with her own private life. Her writing is a revelation. Its style is both elusive and concrete, simple and poetic.
The Years is not an easy book to read but deeply worthwhile.
Considered by many to be the iconic French memoirist's defining work, The Years is a narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present, cultural habits, language, photos, books, songs, radio, television, advertising and news headlines. Annie Ernaux invents a form that is subjective and impersonal, private and communal, and a new genre - the collective autobiography - in order to capture the passing of time. At the confluence of autofiction and sociology, The Years is 'a Remembrance of Things Past for our age of media domination and consumerism' (New York Times),…
Lawrence Osborne’s books lie somewhere between thrillers, memoirs, psychological investigations, and cross-cultural mysteries. He has been likened to Graham Greene, Paul Bowles, and Ian McEwen, but his stories are truly contemporary in feeling and could be called Expat Noir.
I loved this book for its depiction of the confusions experienced by a veteran British journalist as he attempted to unravel the disappearance of a student protestor amidst the pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong in 2019-2020. His descriptions of the city, its texture and sensations, and the increasing difficulties arising from powerful political pressures as he follows tangled threads involving his own deep feelings for the missing student are brilliantly interwoven.
I can’t think of any other author treading this terrain so well: the white middle-class expatriate in Asia has become something of a taboo subject, but this book shows how much can be learnt from a still unravelling colonial history.
A veteran British journalist living in Hong Kong investigates the disappearance of a student protestor amidst the pro-democracy demonstrations in this unsettling new novel from the acclaimed author of The Forgiven
After twenty years as an ex-pat reporter in Hong Kong, Adrian Gyle has almost nothing to show for it. But now the streets are choked with students demanding democratic freedoms, and the old world is beginning to fall apart.
Adrian's old friend Jimmy Tang, the scion of a wealthy Hong Kong family, has begun a reckless affair with Rebecca, a leading pro-democracy protestor. But when Rebecca disappears and Jimmy…
Wifedom is Funder's masterwork. It argues convincingly that beloved and respected author George Orwell was a misogynist cad who exploited his talented wife Eileen O’Shaugnessy and took his best ideas from her.
The book is about writing: George Orwell’s writing, and Funder’s experience of discovery as she follows the slender traces leading to her revelations from a handful of his wife’s long-hidden letters.
Orwell (his real name was Eric Arthur Blair) took everything he could get from his wife. She has been largely eliminated from his writerly history, but now thanks to Funder’s meticulous research we see the full tragedy of being wife to such a self-centred and often cruel man. She sustained them through almost unthinkable trials, including an episode of the Spanish Civil War, all the while supporting her husband’s writing at the expense of any life of her own.
Without her, there would have been no Orwell, certainly no Animal Farm, which can virtually be attributed to Eileen. The case is well-made, although some have seen it as feminist special pleading. However, it is a fantastic read, almost like a mystery, beautifully written in its unfolding interconnections. More literary fun than your average thriller!
At the end of summer 2017, Anna Funder found herself at a moment of peak overload. Family obligations and household responsibilities were crushing her soul and taking her away from her writing deadlines. She needed help, and George Orwell came to her rescue.
"I've always loved Orwell," Funder writes, "his self-deprecating humour, his laser vision about how power works, and who it works on." So after rereading and savoring books Orwell had written, she devoured six major biographies tracing his life and work. But then she read about his forgotten wife, and it was a revelation.
Revolutionary Baby is a collection of original stories exploring the fears and struggles of ordinary men and women caught between conflicting ways of life, touched in different ways by the revolutions that made our century.
Women and men, younger and older, richer and poorer, all from different backgrounds, are caught in moments of decision, unexpectedly resulting in the transformation of their lives.
They confront the past and change how they look at options for the present and the future. These stories are not memoirs or autobiographical, but they reflect the author’s experiences from the 1960s into the new millennium as a student, an activist, a mother, an academic, a traveller, an onlooker, and a participant in those transformative times.
