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Continue reading →: When The Mountain Fell by Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz
translated from the French (Switzerland) by Sarah Fisher Scott In the early summer of 1749 in a valley on the south side of the Bernese Alps in Switzerland, at an altitude on 1450 metres, two massive landslides fell. Thousands of tons of rocks tumbled from 500 metres forming a 2…
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Continue reading →: Ticket to Ride by Dennis Potter
I read a few reviews of this from people who wrote that they couldn’t work out what the hell was going on. Those sort of comments attract me. It was swiftly added to my list. A middle-aged man on a train bound for London breaks down in tears, having suddenly…
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Continue reading →: Car by Harry Crews
Crews went through a prolific period of five years leading up to 1972, during which he wrote five novels, each a bit funnier, each a bit shorter, each more inventive, but each with less emotion than the previous. This is a good example, the fifth of those five, as it…
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Continue reading →: The Far Islands and Other Cold Places by Elizabeth Taylor
This was a very suitable read for International Women’s Day, a forgotten jewel in fact, though I can’t claim to have taken it on with that in mind. The book is a memoir or sorts, of Elizabeth Taylor, who in the golden years of Arctic exploration, refused to be put…
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Continue reading →: Extraordinary Places By Bicycle by Pauline & Hugh Symonds
This is a stunningly presented book with breathtaking photography and awe-inspiring descriptions of the decade of cycle touring undertaken by a retired teaching couple from the north of England. Rather than opt for the sort of retirement most people do, Pauline and Hugh embarked on physically challenging adventures that took…
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Continue reading →: The Locked Room by Paul Auster
New York Trilogy #3 – published 1986 Auster’s trilogy concludes strongly, with the best of the three novels. In the first two Auster used mystery to set the scene for a philosophical consideration of identity and dealing with trauma. Though this is similarly structured in its first half, it is…
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Continue reading →: When The Whales Leave by Yuri Rytkheu
translated from the Russian by Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse Yuri Rytkheu was born in 1930 in Uelen, a village that sits on a barrier spit of land on the tip of the far northeastern Chukchi peninsula, just over sixty miles from Alaska. He died in 2008, and was one of Russia’s…
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Continue reading →: For Fear Of Little Men by John Blackburn
I’m new to the writing of John Blackburn, but the experimental nature of his work, and his refusal to follow any sort of norm, has already grabbed me. Here he introduces the reader to three quite bizarre narrative threads. In London a man pays a prostitute to just sleep with…
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Continue reading →: Hard By A Great Forest by Leo Vardiashvili
Saba and his older brother, Sandro, came to London as children with their father, Irakli, in 1992, as refugees from the civil war; their mother stayed behind in Georgia, where she died. Thirty years on, Irakli has returned to Georgia, and communicates to his son in England that he has…
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Continue reading →: March into SpringThe start of March is the start of spring as far as the meteorologists are concerned, though astronomical spring is closer to 20 March, the vernal equinox, when day is as long as night. Not much sign of it in weather terms here in Shap though, with some snow forecast…
To live more widely
supera superiora sequi
SafeReturnDoubtful is my alias.
Where is Andy?
I was so much older then…
Quote of the Week
Alice asked the Cheshire Cat, who was sitting in a tree, ‘What road do I take?’ The cat asked, ‘Where do you want to go?’ ‘I don’t know,’ Alice answered. ‘Then,’ said the cat, ‘it really doesn’t matter, does it?’
Lewis Carroll
Safe Return Doubtful 