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Finding Inspiration – Part One
You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfume and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. – Ray Bradbury All writing starts with words – your own, or someone else’s, but where does one find these words? Do you remember the first book that had an impact…
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The Spy: The Dancer Whose Clothes Kept Falling Off
Most people swoon at the very mention of Paulo Coelho, a Brazilian novelist who rose to prominence in the late 1980s with The Alchemist, regarding his every word as a droplet from some source of pristine knowledge and positive energy, leaving me (and most probably a handful of other skeptics) feeling like an utter villain…
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Imagine
Imagine being alone Here In this room All on your own No hope No one will appear No expectations The door won’t creak Resigned Ready Aware Of the quiet Of the unspoken whisper Of the unbroken peace Of your own heartbeat The only sound In your head And the traffic underneath The door untouched Air unruffled…
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Love Thy Mother: Coraline by Neil Gaiman
Neil Gaiman’s mild horror novella Coraline (2002) is a book I keep returning to whenever I find myself missing my own mother, and that is definitely the case today, during the Mother’s Day weekend. The story of Coraline is one where numerous contemporary parents and children could recognize themselves: the desperately bored little girl looking…
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Swing Time: Book Review
Each novel by Zadie Smith seems to be an independent stylistic experiment, from her initial omniscient narrators in the White Teeth (2000) and On Beauty (2005), to her polyphonic experiment in NW (2012), to her latest work Swing Time (2016), where she relies heavily on a loosely autobiographical, quite biased first-person narrator. The story is…
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Sarajevo: What to Read on Your Way Home
Every day, one way or another, I end up being asked about my identity, which I need to express in the way that will be the clearest to my interlocutor. I end up bringing up my national, professional, private, or whatever identity I am required to present at the time. However, the more I think…
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On Memory: The Buried Giant
Since Jonathan Swift’s political satire Gulliver’s Travels, fantasy has often been used a means to an end, an imaginary stage with an unlikely cast of characters relied upon to obliquely transmit a very real and powerful contemporary message. Kazuo Ishiguro’s post-Arthurian epic The Buried Giant (2015) employs fantasy tropes in order to muse on the…
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What Lurks Beneath the Surface: The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Dark nooks and crannies inhabited by ghouls, trolls, and hags, the monsters under the bed, the suspicious stranger in the street, the thing that creeps outside the window as soon as the night falls – do any of these ring a bell? Numerous highly individualised and vivid fears worm their way into the mind of…
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On a Cloudy Day
The sun appeared out of nowhere and cast its golden breath across the furniture. It stroked the pillows, ruffled the plant’s rowdy leaves, upset the candle. I blinked a couple of times, and it was gone as if it had never been there before. © 2017 Erna G. – All Rights Reserved
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The Grownup Magic: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell
‘Unquestionably the finest English novel of the fantastic written in the last seventy years’ says the renowned Neil Gaiman about Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, however, one cannot help but wonder which books Mr Gaiman actually placed into the category of the ‘fantastic’ so that they ended up overtaken by Clarke’s gargantuan novel.…
Myths & Stories 