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"The Hare with Amber Eyes" has become an international phenomenon. Fiammetta Rocco follows the author to Vienna and finds the saga continuing ...   read more »

Robert Walser's "Berlin Stories", translated into English for the first time, have humble subjects and fabulous images, writes Simon Willis ...  read more »

In the ninth in our series Notes on a Voice, Robert Butler takes on the world's most famous dramatist ...  read more »

 ~ Posted by Robert Butler, December 27th 2011

In a 21-minute radio interview (the highlights were broadcast today) the Archbishop of Canterbury discusses Dostoevsky with the BBC's diplomatic correspondent Bridget Kendall. Three years ago, Dr Rowan Williams wrote a book about the 19th-century Russian novelist, in part, he says as a reaction to the attacks on Christianity by Richard Dawkins and others. The Archbishop felt that when he spoke to atheists about faith they seem to be talking about something very different to him. In their eyes, faith was seen as "a rather second-rate theory to explain why the world is the way it is or a second-rate psychological crutch for people who can't bear the weight of reality". 

Dostoevsky wrote that if you tried to get a group of people to agree that two plus two equals four, they were almost bound to say "why not five?" There was something stubborn and perverse in the human imagination that wanted to go beyond the obvious. Dr Williams says, "I turn to Dostoevsky and think, well that sounds more like what I think faith is than what Richard Dawkins thinks faith is."

Eighteen minutes in, Dr Williams sums up the connection between fiction and faith, 

Fiction helps you to understand that whatever the principles, whatever the sort of standing rules and perspectives on the moral and the spiritual life, human beings are every bit as unpredictable as Dostoevsky sets out, that they resist rational cataloguing and categorisation, and they often resist reasonable solutions. And you don't begin to understand humanity unless you understand that thread of wildness that's in it all. 

 

 

 

Maggie Fergusson chooses a mischievous novel by Alan Hollinghurst and a gripping murder investigation by Richard Lloyd Parry ...  read more »

Our literary editor Maggie Fergusson recommends Jeanette Winterson on her mother, Joan Didion on her daughter, and four others ...  read more »

In our eighth instalment of Notes on a Voice, Emma Hogan considers the rhythms and registers of T.S. Eliot's verse ...  read more »

Maggie Fergusson enjoys a Booker-winner, a fine life of Dickens and a sharp twist on Homer ...  read more »

Kate Beaton's "Hark! A Vagrant" is a collection of comic strips with subjects drawn from classical literature, revolutionary history and pop culture. It’s an endearingly strange mix; there are strips that crack jokes about calligraphist monks, and others that send up adolescents straight out of Kevin Smith’s cult film ‘‘Clerks’’. The style of the drawings and the bend towards Victoriana (Sherlock Holmes, Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker) recalls the grim art of Edward Gorey. Yet the tone, while unafraid of the macabre, is resolutely silly. 

The result is an entertaining and anachronistic send-up of canonical texts. In her hands Jane Eyre's Mr Rochester is a melodramatic creep with not only a mad wife but also “underage smut and racist figurines” in the attic. Whenever his fiancée tries to express concerns about his past, he smothers her passionately in his arms. Beaton also winningly skewers literary tropes such as courtly love, in strips where a frustrated gentlewoman is continually stymied in her desires by a lover who can only express his feelings through poetry, fasting and lute-strumming.    read more »

When the HBO docudrama “Too Big to Fail” first aired on American television in May, many critics were willing to extend the project some credit, as it were, for seeking thrills in a situation that Michael Kinsley described as “Too Complicated to Understand”. The film was co-produced by Andrew Ross Sorkin, the New York Times journalist who wrote the 640-page book about the 2008 financial crisis on which it was based (reviewed here), and the result is an altogether faithful condensation of Mr Sorkin’s text, with the occasional license taken for dramatic effect. (A scene with the treasury secretary Hank Paulson, played by a brooding William Hurt, wandering about a nearly empty Times Square at dawn is as visually striking as it is preposterous.) Mr Kinsley gently chided the film for ramping up the excitement—“‘Too Big to Fail’ uses all the familiar ‘Law & Order’ techniques for creating a sense of urgency on the cheap”—but he accepted Mr Sorkin’s version of what happened in 2008, praising the movie for telling the story “with exemplary clarity.” The Economist deemed the film “fast-paced, well-acted and clear,” a lucid portrayal of “the ugly choice between bail-out and total meltdown.”  read more »