celticman's blog

The picture on the cover of this book is a beautiful young girl, a cygnet, before becoming a swan. Below the author’s name, a gushing endorsement from the Sunday Times : ‘The year’s most talked about novel...extraordinary’. The ordinariness of the extraordinary has become something difficult to live down. Here we have a sixteen-year old adolescent with leukaemia. She knows she is dying and there is nothing anyone can do about it, but in a way...

Putin’s Russia welcomes athletes and spectators to the Sochi Winter Olympics. According to news reports they haven’t enough snow and have to use machines to create the necessary runways and conditions for it to go ahead, making it the most expensive Olympics ever. There will be no protests in Putin’s Russia, as there are in Brazil for that great media bauble called the World Cup. The notion of perestroika and glasnost are from a different...

This the second of three programmes was entitled ‘The War Machine’. All wars, of course, are fought in the name of peace and it would be far better if it were left to machines. This is a great mock-up of 1966 and it’s all over now, but it was a close run thing. Paxman, for example, interviewed two retired trade-unionists in Ferguson’s shipyard in Glasgow. They were old, but they weren’t that old as to have been on strike for higher pay and...

A collection of short stories that won the Man Booker International Prize, which is a surprise, because nobody publishes short stories now, but if you’re Alice Munro you can pretty well do what you like. A good story—whether it’s short or long—makes you think of other stories, perhaps something that happened in childhood. Bad stories are easy to spot. There are no bumps or mounds among the words, no mountains of childhood and you might just as...

Watching or reading about the Holocaust, or the horrors of the Japanese prison camps, always makes me hungry. I don’t know if that makes me empathetic or a greedy bastard. I suspect in another life I’d have made quite a good Nazi. I’ve read about Terezin before. It was a half-way house to the hell of Auschwitz and other extermination camps. In buildings that should have held a maximum of 6000 the camp held, in 1942, 60 000 and they kept coming,...

Howl is a poem, perhaps the poem, that helped to bring together a loose group of writers and poets that we refer to as the Beat Generation. Certainly, Epstein and Freiman have put lots of work into establishing those credentials. The film jumps back and forth between Alan Ginsberg’s (played by James Franco) inaugural reading of the poem at the Six Gallery Reading in 1955, the 1957 obscenity trial of Lawrence Ferlingetti (Andrew Rogers) and his...

The Boy at the Gate is Danny Ellis aged eight. He’s waiting for his Ma at one of the three gates leading into and out of Artane Industrial School. It’s run by the Christian Brothers and has five dormitories with 175 bed, a cinema and a 325-foot long hall, a concert hall, various rooms, kitchens, administrative block. When Ellis talks about the Christian Brothers ‘caring’ for children he marks out the word care by quotation marks. ‘Christian’ and...

Let’s start with the important stuff. In the Acknowledgment’s page Kevin acknowledges all his friends on a writers’ website AbcTales.com. Yeh, I know, never heard of it either. If I had heard of it I might have read some of Kevin’s stuff and in particular the narrator Tom meeting his sister, Karen, her husband Rod (Rod’s a rod) and their daughter Natalie to celebrate his mum’s eightieth-odd birthday, and been wildly impressed. Tom is a writer. I...

Sometimes you pick a book and sometimes a book picks you. I’d looked at this book, read a little and put it down again, read a little and put it down again. It looked to be one of those books I tend to specialise in writing that nobody ever reads and fades from memory quicker than a cuttlefish. You might not know what a cuttlefish is and neither might I, but somewhere in the world someone does, and that’s enough guff. The sign of a good book is...

This book is described as a fable, a conceit, a what if? It’s I’d guess aimed at children or adolescents, although, of course books like the Northern Lights series, Harry Potter, Little Women or Treasure Island were also read and enjoyed by those that can be described as being more adult. I can’t say I enjoyed The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas much, but maybe that proves I’ve finally grown up and become more mature. It’s quite a simple tale. Nine-...