Rebecca West: This Real Night, and Cousin Rosamund

These two novels are the sequels to West's The Fountain Overflows (1957), a saga about an eccentric and musical Aubrey family in London from the Edwardian period to the Depression. I really loved The Fountain Overflows, but I'm not so sure about its sequels. This may be because they were incomplete on West's death, and … Continue reading Rebecca West: This Real Night, and Cousin Rosamund →

Rebecca West, The Fountain Overflows

I took a while to get into this sturdy family saga: it was blocking the reading pile for weeks while I struggled to pay it proper attention. Then something clicked, and the peculiarities of The Fountain Overflows (1956) began to attract my attention. At first I thought that it was rather like Rose Macaulay’s Told … Continue reading Rebecca West, The Fountain Overflows →

Dogged mid-West endurance: Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark

This time in the Really Like This Book's podcast script catch-up, I’ve gone west, to Willa Cather’s beautiful novel The Song of the Lark from 1915. If ever there was an advertisement for idyllic American settings, this novel is it. The descriptions evoke desert life near the Mexican border, clean and tidy Scandinavian-immigrant town life in … Continue reading Dogged mid-West endurance: Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark →

John Updike and The Witches of Eastwick

Today’s letter in the Really Like This Book podcast scripts catch-up is U. I haven't read many authors whose surnames begin with U, and John Updike is not one of my favourite writers. I find his writing about American suburban life in the 1960s and 1970s a bit peculiar. When I read some of his short … Continue reading John Updike and The Witches of Eastwick →

The Importance of Being Earnest: the opera

I have never heard anything like this before. The Irish composer Gerald Barry wrote a comic opera based on The Importance of Being Earnest, performed for the first time in 2012, in France (and later on in London at the Barbican). I had no idea of its existence, but when I was given the CD … Continue reading The Importance of Being Earnest: the opera →