How Does This Look? Kirsty Gunn I watch my daughters getting ready to go out and it occurs to me how – though we don’t talk about them much, in ordinary life, I mean – adjectives make up a huge part of who we are. ‘Lovely,’ I say to the girls, as they pile on some glamorous top or other, change their shoes for the third time. ‘Gorgeous.’ These kinds of words spring out of my mouth on a pretty regular basis – the perfects, the wonderfuls – but are they really even descriptions? Adumbrations? Ornamentation, even? ‘Beautiful.’ I say, just like everyone does in The Awkward Age, that novel by Henry James which is about the kind of society that is not beautiful at all. I may only mean ‘beautiful’ to be beautiful when I say it but by contrast Henry James is acutely aware in each of his books how a description can operate to bring about pretty much any kind of outcome. James knows about adjectives, alright. He’s alert not only to the sheer joy of putting them to use – ... read more

Gabriel Josipovici Karenin’s Discovery
Chapters 8 and 9 of Part II of Anna Karenina form a, perhaps the, crucial turning-point of the novel. What has until then been tacit, barely acknowledged, now comes out into the open as Karenin decides to confront his wife with the fact that her actions are giving rise to gossip in society; and then, when he actually confronts her, both discover feelings in themselves and in the other they didn’t know existed.

The four or five pages this takes are a perfect example of Tolstoy’s narrative art and of his ease with the conventions of nineteenth-century fiction, with the unobtrusive narrator guiding us into the depths of the characters’ thoughts and emotions within a well-realised setting:

When he reached home he went into his study, as usual, and seated himself in his armchair, and opened a book on the Papacy at the place marked by a paperknife. ... read more

Bill Manhire Angry Man

He has three barking dogs in the back of the car,
old Silas and… I don’t know the others.
He has parked the car up over the kerb outside the library
and is standing nearby, waiting to see what will happen.

But nothing happens. He stands there all day
and the dogs fall asleep, and he opens the car door
and now the moon and stars are out in the sky
and here is the light by which his children read their books.



Library Song
... read more