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About KU’s Trollope Prize.
1. Central Park and three more new poems. By Tim Suermondt
2. The Pleasure of Ferocity. A review of Malika Moustadraf’s short stories. By Michelene Wandor
3. Pastmodern Art. By David Rosenberg
4. What Is Truth? By Alan Macfarlane
5. The Beatles: Yeah x 3. Fab books and films reviewed by Alan Wall
6. Two sequences of poems by David Plante, introduced by Anthony Howell
7. The Marriage by Hart’s Crane of Faustus and Helen by John Matthias
8. Young Wystan by Alan Morrison
9. Nothing Romantic Here. Desmond Egan reviews Donald Gardner
10. Parisian Poems, by César Vallejo, translated by César Eduardo Jumpa Sánchez.
…and much more, below in this column.
Audio archive: Two poems, with an audio track, from Heart Monologues by Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani | Daragh Breen’s Aural Triptych | Hayden Carruth reads Contra Mortem and Journey to a Known Place | Anthony Howell reads three new poems | James Laughlin reads Easter in Pittsburgh and five more | Peter Robinson reads Manifestos for a lost cause, Dreamt Affections and Blind Summits
Previously: More below. Scroll down.
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2011: Golden-beak in eight parts. By George Basset (H. R. Haxton).
2012: The Invention of the Modern World in 18 parts. By Alan Macfarlane.
2013: Helen in three long parts. By Oswald Valentine Sickert.
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2018: After the Snowbird, Comes the Whale, by Tom Lowenstein.
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Occ. Notes…
A dilemma for educators:
Philosophy and the public impact.
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Michelene Wandor on Derek Walcott and the T.S. Eliot Prize.
.Nick Lowe: the true-blue Basher shows up for a friend.
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Anthony Howell: The new libertine in exile.
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Kate Hoyland: Inventing Asia, with Joseph Conrad and a Bible for tourists.
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Who is Bruce Springsteen? by Peter Knobler.
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Martin Sorrell on John Ashbery’s illumination of Arthur Rimbaud.
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The beauty of Quantitative Easing.
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Prohibition’s ‘original Progressives’.
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European populism? Departments
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The ‘extravagant mystery’ of a mother.
A Fortnightly Review of
Paulette: French by birth, English by chance
by Martin Sorrell
Impress Books | 178 pages | £12.99 $16.91
By PETER O’BRIEN.
She was born in 1916 in France and died in 2010 in England. Although we all have swirling within us a fractured memoir or other material that might present parts of our life to a wider audience, very few such documents ever get organized, written or shared. A teacher, author, editor, and translator (Apollinaire, Lorca, Molière, Rimbaud, Verlaine), Sorrell has given us a story of familial love and affection, but also of wonder and questions. It’s an attempt to understand or at least document the private and public parts of a life, in all its extravagant mystery.
Much of this story is yoked to time and its mutability. As a young mother, Paulette, late from seeing her children off to school, makes a mad dash for the morning train:
Time’s grand and historic vagaries are intertwined with personal and particular vagaries. Throughout these pages and the two world wars that they embody, young children grow into old age; houses are lived in, filled up with tableaux and epics, and then abandoned; teachings are learned and forgotten and rekindled, all bound by the fluttering inquisitiveness of the author. When Paulette does die, Sorrell has just a passing speck to hang on to:
As with many European families who lived through the last century, there are traumas of various sorts: of extermination camps, of the harsh treatment doled out to collaborators, of a knock on the door that may mean the capture or escape of a family member, of surviving for a few more months on “meals” composed of scraps of leather and a few drops of sewing-machine oil.
Amid the endearing and parfois triste moments of this life, women have a lot to say and a lot to do. As the author says, “Three generations of women needed to be stronger than their men.” (As the son of a mother who had ten children, brought up 12 other step-children, and who was twice widowed, perhaps I can say that such an observation may be applied to other generations and other families as well.)
As is evident from Paulette’s multivalent name, and the subtitle of this book, this is a tale of two languages and two cultures. There is a funny story of Paulette having to prepare two separate menus, one French and one English, and her English-born children drifting over to the French table to scrounge some of what they considered to be the superior dish. And the author shares an old joke built from a key difference between the French and the English: English engineer demonstrates to a French colleague an ingenious piece of machinery he’s invented, and by trial and error has got to function. Impressive, says the Frenchman, but will it work in theory?
At one point, the author describes his mother as coming from a land “where no one could afford to linger over death.” Paulette might not have been able to, but Martin Sorrell has lingered over both her life and her death. He has given us a thoughtful and colourful memoir of a person we may see walking by us on any street, on any day of our lives.
♦
Peter O’Brien‘s most recent book is Cleopatra at the Breakfast Table: Why I Studied Latin With My Teenager and How I Discovered the Daughterland. He is also responsible for four other books, including Build a Better Book Club (Macmillan Canada) and Introduction to Literature: British, American, Canadian (Harper & Row). He is in the middle of a six-year project annotating / illustrating / disrupting the 628 pages of Finnegans Wake by James Joyce; pages from the project have appeared in The Fortnightly Review (here) and in journals in Canada, England, Ireland, Israel, and the U.S. His teenaged daughter, three brothers, six sisters, eight stepbrothers and four stepsisters have provided voluminous and conflicting material, as well as various survival techniques.
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Publication: Saturday, 29 September 2018, at 10:12.
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