In How to Kill Your Family by Bella Mackie, we are led by Grace Bernard through an epic revenge mission against her fashion tycoon father who left her and her mother to live in comparative depravation while he cosied up with his ‘real family’ in extravagance and luxury. This part of the story is as [...]
Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (Vintage: 1997, 9780099732518) Today my Dalloway Week Woolf fest comes to and end, and I’m giving Hermione Lee’s biography of Virginia Woolf the honour (ha! LOL. Snickering of all manner) of being the first non-fiction title posted to Absurd Reviews. Reading a Virginia Woolf biography, as with any writer or artist [...]
Michael Cunningham, The Hours (Fourth Estate: 2003, 9781841150352) I hope you had a good Dalloway Day yesterday and on Monday. I did promise a Dalloway week so I thought I’d expand the Dalloway horizon today. Meet, or revisit, The Hours by Michael Cunningham. The book is a/n(?) homage, or reworking, of Mrs Dalloway. In the [...]
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925) Happy Dalloway Day, again, on this Wednesday in the middle of June. In England, a bit warm, as fresh as Clarissa’s morning in the book. Today I bring you a passage I hope you will enjoy. This is Clarissa Dalloway recalling being eighteen and in love with her friend Sally. [...]
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925) “If Woolf was better acquainted with profound sorrow than most, she was also, by some mysterious manifestation of will, better than almost anyone at conveying the pure joy of being alive. The quotidian pleasure of simply being present in the world.” – Michael Cunningham Mrs Dalloway follows Clarissa Dalloway as [...]
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925) Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway is set in London on a Wednesday in the middle of June in 1923, which would make the date June 13th. While Bloomsday (which celebrates James Joyce’s Ulysses) is widely celebrated every year, Dalloway Day is a far more modest affair. There are events to mark [...]
Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half (Dialogue Books: 2020, 9780349701479) The Vignes twins are descendants of the founder of Mallard, a small, unmapped town in Louisiana. Alphonse Decuir, a formerly enslaved, biracial man now in possession of his father’s land, wanted to build a place for people “who would never be accepted as white”. His vision [...]
Cherie Jones, How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House (Tinder Press: 2021, 9781472268778) How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House by Cherie Jones is set in the mid-1980s in the fictional Baxter’s Beach, Barbados, where luxury holiday villas skirt the paradisiacal beach and intrude on the local community that is afflicted by poverty and violence. [...]
Ali Smith, Summer (Hamish Hamilton: 2020, 9780241207062) And so Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet comes to an end. Smith’s project begun in 2016, with Autumn, and since then she has published one book a year, tackling the mess we have all been going through or witnessing over the past few years: Brexit, xenophobia, misogyny, climate change, [...]
Ashley Audrain, The Push (Michael Joseph: 2021, 9780241434550) Blythe comes from a line of neglectful, abusive mothers. She seems to more or less have made peace with her background but it comes back to haunt her when her picture-perfect-obsessed husband decides they need a baby. She knows he expects her to be the perfect wife [...]
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