Demob Happy

FIRST PUBLISHED AT THE LINE OF BEST FIT French windows 4/10 In 1994 a law was introduced in France by then culture minister Jacques Toubon protecting the French language. One of the outcomes of this globalisation-resisting move was that two out of five songs on French radio must be sung in la langue maternelle . [...]

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Chance – the musical ! 9/10 I’m having a sudden urge to raid Paul Auster’s works, following up ‘Mr. Vertigo‘ with ‘The Music of Chance‘, a book I had long-neglected but somehow – like an Auster character, perhaps – convinced myself I had already read. This is probably because of the low-key but cultish film [...]

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Scaling the dizzy heights ? 8/10 It’s impossible to write about Paul Auster’s ‘Mr Vertigo‘ and completely avoid the dreaded term ‘Magic Realism’ – even if it’s a genre the writer is not commonly associated with. The fact that the novel centres around a street urchin taught how to fly by a Hungarian showman named [...]

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FIRST PUBLISHED AT THE LINE OF BEST FIT Voice of The Hive 7/10 A sombre flute, the clunking toll of a bell, a solemnly plucked acoustic guitar … cue medieval clichés: misty moats, drawbridges, hooded monks, damsels in distress. But hold on, it’s not Led Zeppelin IV … a shimmering drone, Mellotron, and suddenly all [...]

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Carry the fire 9/10 I was initially surprised to hear that ‘The Road‘, a novel I had wrongly thought to be about a post-apocalyptic world populated by zombie flesh-eaters, had won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In fact only one-part of my initial prognosis was correct; the novel is centred around a man and [...]

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