Tag Archives | war

“An Artist of the Floating World” by Kazuo Ishiguro

14 February 2009 · Reading · Comments { 1 }

An elderly, celebrated artist, Masuji Ono, is living in retirement in Japan just after the end of World War Two. His daughter is having trouble in her marriage negotiations for reasons he can’t understand: gradually he realises it’s because he is associated with the rise of Japanese militarism in the 1930s, a period now discredited [...]

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“A Pale View of Hills” by Kazuo Ishiguro

28 December 2008 · Reading · Comments { 1 }

Most of this novel is memory: a woman thinking about her daughter’s suicide and remembering an earlier summer in post-War Nagasaki. Almost nothing happens in the present day. The whole story takes place in the past. And the story in the past is full of holes. At first this annoyed me but, the more I [...]

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Johann Hari – How we fuel Africa’s bloodiest war

2 November 2008 · Reading · Comments { 0 }

The deadliest war since Adolf Hitler marched across Europe is starting again – and you are almost certainly carrying a blood-soaked chunk of the slaughter in your pocket. When we glance at the holocaust in Congo, with 5.4 million dead, the clichés of Africa reporting tumble out: this is a “tribal conflict” in “the Heart [...]

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“Afterwards” by Rachel Seiffert

14 July 2008 · Reading · Comments { 0 }

The style of writing is very conversational. No beauty, not even many full sentences. The sort of writing with not many verbs. Just reportage,and not always very grammatical, like you were hearing someone tell you it on the phone. That part didn’t work for me, but the advantage of it was that it focused my [...]

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