Fiction
The room darkens, the swollen sky has over-brimmed again. In Pendinas, rain will be running down the glazed brick and granite of Pensarn Villa, varnishing the iron thistles on the Salem railings, streaking the lead-barred, wired-glass canopy of the arcade in Paradise Road. “If only it would clear up,” he says aloud, gazing down the vivid garden, “perhaps we might go out?”
“Give me strength,” Charlotte had prayed audibly, “I just jolly well wish she’d dry up about that Partridge, she was going to be an opera singer before she met him.”
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Author interview on americymru.net.
...the blend
of city and jungle, politics
and mythology, present and past...
Soul-weeds,
'NOW is the time'
Stars jingling in the frost,
we discuss the choice of life.
Without joy, live without enjoyment?
Poetry
We can surely feel that even today the best medium for the preservation and transmission of the past is still a book.
Proust’s great work is exceptional among novels in the degree to which the matter is supplied by memory. And the signs of his substituting memory for imagination are so many and obvious, it may be asked why he didn’t choose rather—what was plainly in his power—to write a greater Praeterita or even a prose Prelude.
Reviews
If Proust actually had made out not only that he had discovered reality by writing a book, but also that others could discover it merely by reading the book, he would have claimed for literature even more than his master in aesthetics, Ruskin, with his derided belief that art has a moral character, had claimed for art—perhaps even more than Wordsworth, with his belief that his readers could find a moral teacher in Nature just as he had done, had claimed for Nature.
Since we needn’t follow Woolf in thinking of those modernists as including her friend Forster, we may in fact think the author of The Good Soldier closer to Forster than to them—not because Ford’s narrative is conventional (it isn’t), nor because adultery is typically a nineteenth-century subject (though it is), but because evidently to Ford also the story is the thing.
What makes even a novel that’s plainly a great story great isn’t the story, isn’t the relation of events. Is Kidnapped a better story than Treasure Island or even than The Coral Island?
