Within a week in 2013 Raynor Winn and her husband Moth lose their home and livelihood and receive the news that Moth has a rare and terminal illness for which there’s no cure ‘Don’t tire yourself, or walk too far, and be careful on the stairs.’
Instead they pack their rucksacks and walk and wild camp The South West Coast Trail, England’s longest way marked long-distance footpath, 630 miles from Minehead in Somerset along the coast of Devon and Cornwall to Poole Harbour in Dorset.
This may look like a phone box, set in a quiet seaside village.
But it’s actually the beautiful Gilbert Scott Library.
The Kashpaws and the Lazarres, the Nanapushes and the Pillagers and the Morrisseys. Love Medicine is a series of interrelated vignettes that follow generations of Ojibwe families, loosely chronologically, from 1934 to 1984 and their interconnected lives on a fictional reservation in North Dakota
It opens in 1981 when June Kashpaw dies, frozen to death in a snowstorm on her way home to the reservation, it’s her spirit that propels the narrative and is woven through every story as the river of memories flows, often meandering, running in and out of each other. Continue reading “Love Medicine”
Written in 1936 I wanted to read this as a counterpoint to This Side of Paradise, one from the beginning of the Jazz age and one from the end. But it wasn’t quite that neat, the atmosphere of the jazz age is here but I think Nightwood is set in its own world and not trapped by any particular time. I found this a demanding and difficult read.
The plot is very slight. Baron Felix Volkbein is married to Robin Vote they divorce and Robin falls in love with Nora Flood who eventually loses her to Jenny Petherbridge. At the centre of these characters is the doctor, Matthew-Mighty-grain-of-salt-Dante O’Connor. In Paris, they’re all strangers and misfits, knotted together by Robin and her effect on them.
Time for another spin and with eight reading weeks allowed I think I can do it this time! I’ve duplicated a couple of titles in my choice of 20 from my original Classics Club list, because I really need the push to read them! On August 9th the numbers will be spun and the corresponding title is the one I’ve got until September 30th to read. Continue reading “Classics Club Spin #24”
Written and directed by Gus Van Sant, Elephant chronicles the events of an ordinary day in a fictional high school in the suburbs of Portland, Oregon – a day when two of the students carry out a shooting based in part on the Columbine High School Massacre.
Using new and unprofessional actors who largely keep their own names, the characters are introduced by name and then followed through their day but in a fragmented style that goes over the same events but from multiple points of view. The camera catches up with the students as they walk along corridors, meet up in the cafeteria or the locker room or the library and we hear snatches of frivolous, inane conversations which are often quite funny. Of course we feel tense because we know what’s going to happen and an early scene of the gunmen walking towards the school, before the camera skips off to show another group, is an example of how we can try and piece the fragments together to build up some sort of time line; but what’s extraordinary is the blankness.
Just Reading A Book 