I’ve received a comment from John Beall pointing out an error in my post of Oct. 7 2013 on the Ernest Hemingway story ‘Cat in the Rain’. I wrote there originally that it was first published in Paris in a … Continue reading
Part Two, continued: for pt one of this critique, click here The ‘American wife’’s prattling, repetitive list of wants now becomes a reiterated ‘want a cat’, culminating in a foot-stamping, petulant ‘ now’. Then the maid knocks and enters their … Continue reading
Ernest Hemingway’s story ‘Cat in the Rain’ was first published in New York in 1925 in the collection In Our Time. Hemingway dedicated the book to his wife Hadley. It was inspired by a visit he made with his wife … Continue reading
Natsume Sōseki (1867-1916), Sanshirō [三四郎] First published as a serial in a newspaper 1908; first book form, 1909. Penguin Classics, 2009. Translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin. Introduction by Haruki Murakami I remember my own feelings of apprehension and … Continue reading
Exactly one year after my long road trip with TD jr and two cats from Berlin to his family’s new home at Sant Cugat, near Barcelona, Mrs TD and I revisited the new house to which they moved a few … Continue reading
George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia Having just been to Mallorca and read Lydie Salvayre’s Cry, Mother Spain, a novel about the impact of the Spanish Civil War on rural families in Catalonia (and parallel descriptions by Bernanos of atrocities perpetrated … Continue reading
Rose Macaulay, Crewe Train (first published 1926) Rose Macaulay (1881- 1958) wrote 23 works of fiction, many of which, like Crewe Train, were light social comedies. Affinities can be seen with many writers of this genre, from Jane Austen to … Continue reading
The New York Poets: An Anthology, edited by Mark Ford (Carcanet Press, 2004) includes a poem by Kenneth Koch (1925-2002) that drew my eye because of the connotations for me of its title. ‘One Train May Hide Another (sign at … Continue reading
People, says Cummings in his 1932 Introduction to the 1971 Penguin Modern Classics edition of this autobiographical novel first published in 1922, had wanted a war book but were disappointed; in The Enormous Room he ‘uses war: to explore an … Continue reading
My first school was a British Army primary in Cyprus. My father, a soldier, was stationed there during the Eoka uprising in the fifties, when Greek nationalists sought union – enosis – with the mother country. This was the Megali … Continue reading