Literature

Novels, short stories and authors

The suffrage story, a working-class slant

I don’t really get the graphic novel. I am neither the target audience nor a fan of the art form. That said, Scarlett and Sophie Rickard’s rendition of Constance Maud’s classic women’s suffrage novel from 1911, No Surrender , is a job well done on several levels. The Rickard sisters have taken an important social realist novel about the battle of votes for women written in 1911 and breathed new life into it for a new, younger readership in the twenty first century. And that’s a good thing because, despite No Surrender being sometimes poor in prose, it is rich in social history. Written by an...

Kino Eye: Banned books burned

The mention of Banned Book Week (Katy Dollar, Solidarity 647) took me back to 1966, when Francois Truffaut made probably the ultimate film about banned literature, Fahrenheit 451 (referring to the temperature at which paper burns). Based on Ray Bradbury’s novel of the same name, the film shows a future 1984-ish dystopia where all books are not only banned and burned by a special government department, “The Firemen”. The Firemen burn books, while mind-bogglingly stupid TV shows feed the population with a trashy alternative to thinking about the world around them. Montag, one of the Firemen...

Last Times where “nothing has ended”

Drawing on the author’s first-hand experience of the fall of Paris and the early French Resistance, Victor Serge’s novel Last Times (New York Review of Books, 2022) offers a bleak, immersive view of France under the German occupation and the Vichy government. Written in the early 1940s, the novel covers a period of just over a year in 1940-41. Serge’s anti-fascist protagonists have an overarching goal that leads them to join the columns of refugees making the arduous journey to Marseilles and — they hope — to a ship that will carry them to the Americas, but one should not read Last Times...

"The People Immortal"

Above: Grossman (on left) in Berlin, 1945 Many readers will no doubt already be acquainted with Vasily Grossman’s much-praised epic novel, Life and Fate which centres on the battle for Stalingrad during the winter months of 1942-43. This new translation of The People Immortal (Maclehose Press, 2022), an earlier novel of his, takes us to the very first months of Operation Barbarossa (the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, commenced 22 June, 1941), when the Soviet army was in retreat in both Ukraine and Belarus. Grossman was a reporter attached to the Red Army and popular among the troops for...

The landmark novel of Estonian literature

Estonian women landworkers c. late 1890s Len Glover reviews Vargamäe (vol. 1 of the Truth and Justice pentalogy), by A H Tammsaare; first English translation by Inna Feldbach and Alan Peter Trei; published by Vagabond Voices, Glasgow, 2019. Estonian fiction is not that well-known in the English-speaking world and small nations have to shout loudly for their voices to be heard. Considered by many to be the landmark novel of Estonian literature, A. H. Tammsaare’s 1926 book Vargamäe is now, at last, available to the English language reader. Tammsaare (originally Anton Hansen, 1878) was born into...

Kino Eye: James Joyce on screen

James Joyce’s semi-autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , published in 1916 and adapted for the screen by Joseph Strick in 1977, depicts the coming of age of Stephen Dedalus (Joyce) played by Luke Johnston (when Stephen was ten) and by Bosco Hogan (later in life). Irish actor T. P. McKenna plays Simon Dedalus, Stephen’s father. He features in one of the most memorable moments in the film: a dinner-table confrontation between Simon and Dante, Stephen’s governess. Simon laments that the Irish “are a priest-ridden race”. Dante angrily responds: “If we are a priest-ridden race...

80 Days and the US West

Sacha Ismail’s TV review of Around The World in 80 Days ( in Solidarity 620 ) motivated me to watch the rest of the series. Initially, judging by the first episode, hadn’t thought much of it. It does get better as the story develops and Fogg and his companions further circumnavigate the globe. The programmes make a good stab at adventure drama which can be enjoyed by both adults and children. I certainly don’t recall the updated political themes, particularly the anti racist stance, cropping up in the 1956 version starring David Niven, which I saw as a kid at The Astoria, Old Kent Road. I was...

Kino Eye: Ulysses, the film

On 2 February 1922, 100 years ago, Sylvia Beach put a few copies of a new book in her bookshop window in Paris. The book was Ulysses , written by an almost unknown Irishman, James Joyce. Book and author went on to great literary fame and controversy. It was only in 1967 that a film version, a low-budget one, was directed by Joseph Strick. Like the novel, the film follows one day (16 June 1904, now “Bloomsday”) in the life of Leopold Bloom (Milo O’Shea), aimlessly wandering the streets of Dublin, although the film shows Dublin as it was in 1967. The film was almost as praised and condemned as...

A previous culture war: Turner and Styron

Nat Turner planning the rebellion In 1967, 136 years after Nat Turner led a slave rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia, the white US novelist William Styron published a book, The Confessions of Nat Turner . The book was written in the first person, Styron giving words to Turner and his story. Prior to the publication of Styron’s book the history of the Turner insurrection was not widely known. For several months Styron’s book received great reviews and grandiose praise. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1968. But within a few months universal acclaim had turned into a very...

Sally Rooney and BDS

On 24 October, the Israeli Land Authority posted tenders for 1,300 new Jewish-settlement houses to be built in the Palestinian West Bank. This is the first big new settlement plan under the current coalition government. The housing minister declared that he also planned to double the settler population in the Jordan Valley, on the side of the West Bank furthest from Israel. Other building projects are being mooted which would cut off the Palestinian village of Beit Safafa and block Palestinian traffic between north and south of the West Bank. Defence Minister Benny Gantz has designated six...

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