Posts filed under “literature”.
Mrs Eckdorf in O’Neil’s Hotel by William Trevor
Reads like this:
He had bought a small plot of ground a few miles from where they lived and he had just erected on it two glass-houses in which he proposed to cultivate tomatoes for profit. He had come back one evening and asked her if she’d ever noticed tomatoes in the shops. ‘A full chip [...]
An Enemy of the People
I’ve made a great discovery. . . and I’ll tell you what it is: the strongest person in the world is the one who stands alone
Dr. Tomas Stockmann.
Henrik Ibsen’s opening play at the newly refurbished Sheffield Crucible, is An Enemy of the People, with Anthony Sher in the role of Dr Stockmann.
It’s a disturbing drama, [...]
Disturbing the Peace by Richard Yates
The second chapter opens with a Kafkaesque scene:
He woke up soaked with sweat, breathing stale and fetid air. A naked light bulb shone in his eyes and he found he was in a steel-framed bunk slung by chains from the wall, like a bunk in a troopship or a jail.
“. . . Everybody out,” a [...]
All Characters are Entirely Fictitious
It usually goes something like this:
All characters in this publication are entirely fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
And it’s nearly always a lie. Robert Liddell suggests that the passage deceives nobody and would be no protection in a libel action, and, he continues, one must suppose that the [...]
Character or Plot?
Most writers who appear on a platform, giving a reading or a talk, will come across the naïve question: What comes first for you, character or plot?
The question is unsophisticated, because in reality it is not possible to separate the two. Character is plot.
Character, in any sense in which we can get it, is action, [...]
