Linkies
Something of a theme here on race and deracination:
A Premier League footballer confronted by police officers as he looked in a jeweller's shop window suggested yesterday he was targeted because he was black. Seems altogether plausible to me.
Jeevan Vasagar finds food for thought in Yasmin Alibhai-Brown's mixture of recipes and memoir - which she likes, even though she longs 'for the day when an Asian history can be written without mentioning curry - but perhaps it can't be done'.
Review of Stranger to History: A Son's Journey Through Islamic Lands by Aatish Taseer, who 'grew up in secular, pluralist India. His early influences included his mother's Sikhism, a Christian boarding school, and He-Man cartoons. Nagging behind this cultural abundance, however, was an absence: of his estranged father, the Pakistani politician Salmaan Taseer'.
Interview with Amit Chaudhuri.
And, possibly fits here on a more meta-level about how societies should be and the costs for everyone of inequality, review of The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett .
Also two reviews which resonated about certain narrative tropes and expectations and the notion that 'depressing' is somehow more worthy:
Patrick Ness comments:
When did we become so enamoured of unpleasantness? More importantly, when did we start automatically accepting it as truth, particularly in literature? The world is, of course, often quite unpleasant, and any brainlessly pain-free book purporting to show truth can and should be dismissed as unrealistic contrivance. But while contrived cruelty may seem more artful than contrived sentiment, it's still contrivance.
While Frank Cottrell Boyce draws attention to the reversal of that downward narrative slope:
[S]ome of the most sublime stories end when an act of grace or love that means "it ain't necessarily so". Abraham doesn't have to sacrifice Isaac. The Green Knight has the right to decapitate Gawain but barely nicks him with his sword. The prodigal son thinks he has spent all his father's love but discovers that it is endless.
Timekeeping: it's All More Complicated, and clock-discipline goes back earlier than you may have thought (though I think I knew the thing about the monks and canonical hours).
Oh, yes, and review by Mark Lawson of Julie Myerson's notorious work about her skunk-addicted son: it is, in fact, a memoir, and not a novel, which gave me to think that maybe it should be marketed as 'Misery Memoir: Parents Strike Back' and to wonder whether this is going to be the New Thing.