Tuesday 4 November 2008
Winning competition
Review of Anita Shreve's novel 'Body Surfing':Anita Shreve's drama is a polished performance of nuanced social observation, ersatz romance and cloying tragedy,Partway through the narrative, Sydney Sklar, like me, is left reeling from an unexpected blow. A simple, beautiful sentence like"a lobster making its new shell", then a moment later Shreve produces a minature symphony of word-strangeness:aesthetically subverting.And she brings out in paragrams the secret metonymic chain-with a beautifully constructed referential mode... and the co-prescence of intra textual movements, finally reaches a synthesis.She understands that the world is co-terminous with the logic of her beautiful and captivating prose.
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Getting into the finals of the 'Times' nationwide book review competition, was a major first for me.There were 20 finalists--comprising 4 men and 16 women.And we all met at the five-star Haymarket Hotel, for lunch with Anbita shreve.We were each presented with a hardback copy of her latest book 'Testimony'.But the most memorable moment was chatting with the author.I am busy finalising my latest novel'The Cloister Conspiracy'.Quote:The post-Enlightenment, post-Freuden mind cannot find bliss and if and when someone does, this is swiftly pathologised as self-hatred, repressed guilt or masochism.This is my conclusioin about Western ideas of the contemplative life.
My friend, Sister Magdalen-Mary,spb, who is a contemplative nun writes in a preface:'The novel describes an arc, its end standing in telling relationship to its opening while eschewing closure.It is a profound achievement, psychologically penetrating, both satisfying and challenging in design, a worthy companion to Thomas Merton's Elected Silence, one of his best masterpieces, and her finest book on contemplative prayer.'
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