Independent
A long way from paradise
Reviewed by Melissa Benn
Friday, 15 August 2008
John Berger has always defied conventional genres and boundaries, mixing and blurring art criticism and autobiography, poetry and letters, diaries and drawing. His first novel purported to be a diary of a previously undiscovered Hungarian painter; in From A to X, long listed last month for the Booker Prize, prior to publication, he punctuates the story with line sketches of human hands.
(Read it here)
Tender is The night, by F Scott Fitzgerald
Book of a Lifetime: by Melissa Benn
Friday, 7 March 2008
Tender is the Night, the book that caused F Scott Fitzgerald the most artistic heartache, was neither a critical nor a commercial success when it was first published in 1934. But its reputation has, rightly, grown and it remains one of my favourite books, suffused as it is with both the glamour and poignancy of Fitzgerald’s own life: in particular, the failure of his marriage to the lovely, unbalanced Zelda and his acute sense of himself as a great and a ruined artist.
(Read it here)
Robert Harris: The former PM in his new novel is strikingly similar to our ex-leader
The author says that there are parallels – but that’s not the whole story
By Melissa Benn
Friday, 28 September 2007
Advance publicity for The Ghost has been a publisher’s dream of the best, gossipy kind. Robert Harris’s narrative centres on Adam Lang, former British premier, holed up in a swanky holiday home in Martha’s Vineyard with his spiky-haired wife Ruth. Betrayed by a former close Cabinet colleague, Lang is awaiting indictment on a charge of war crimes after a disastrous Middle East conflict, when he hires a cynical ghost-writer to pen his memoirs.
(Read it here)
