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What is a Human Woman? – Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine
As Elizabethan literary theorist Sir Philip Sidney claims in his 16th century work titled The Defence of Poesie, the purpose of poetry, later extended to encompass all literary genres, is to simultaneously teach and delight the reader. Gail Honeyman’s debut novel Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine fits neatly into this category, since it teaches us…
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The Forgetful Narrator: Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey
The idea of a completely reliable narrator is quite a questionable subject, since we are all unreliable when it comes to telling our own stories, hence, as the term ‘omniscient’ suggests, the reliable narrator must be some kind of divine, all-knowing being, allowed a profound insight into the depths of all other characters. However, the…
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The Addled Narrator: A.J. Finn’s The Woman in the Window
After I’d completed A.J. Finn’s The Woman in the Window, I put the book down in my lap, leaned back, and stared somewhere into the middle distance while my mind went through the events in the novel once again, weighing and arranging them so as to form a neatly assembled puzzle. Eponymous of a 1944…
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Caraval: All About the Game
I enjoy carnivals, circuses, harlequins, masks, mystery, and the complete overturning and subversion of social norms, rules, and conventions that goes with them. One of my favourite books is Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus where all of these reach a certain peak (The Stitched-up Girl), and I had something similar in mind when I…
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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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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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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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A New Take on Historiographic Metafiction: Atkinson and Donoghue
Bunty chops up the blood-glazed kidney, the idea of testicles never far from her mind. She hates cooking, it’s too much like being nice to people. Here she goes again – I spend my entire life cooking, I’m a slave to housework – chained to the cooker … all those meals, day after day, and…
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Fireworks
‘Come on, get up! Wake up, come on, it’s started again! Move! Let’s go!’ The blast shook the house. Mother pulled me out of the bed and down the stairs, clutching my sister in her arms. Another blast. We stopped in the stairwell. There was a short stretch of terrace we needed to run through…
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The Sugarcoating: A Birthday Poem
Another year has blown by As quickly as a gust of wind It has ruffled the leaves Strewn the papers across the floor Turned the pages of a book Upset the water a bit Rattled the window panes And made me shudder I stir the memories In the coffee pot And leave them to brew…
Myths & Stories 