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"Leveritt, Thomas"
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The exchange-rate between love and money
Sarajevo, 2003. Frito and Bannerman, business partners and best friends, roll into town looking to soak up a dose of Reconstruction Money and make an easy killing. Easy until they realize that Clare Leischman, a prosecutor with the international war crimes tribunal, is the best girl either of them has ever met, and that they can't both have her as much as they would each, ideally, like.
Book
Sexual Medicine Sold as Sugar: Ashley Cardiff's Essays
There's a similar geometry to these essays, which are styled to echo the author's own sexual development: we start out with a carefree and primary-colored little melody; then complex chords creep in, nothing serious, still very hummable; and then we're under a Beethoven shame fugue with panic attacks and full-spectrum revulsion, where we stay for most of the book, boiling with Holden Caulfield fury not just about sexuality and its discontents, but about gender, family, jobs, hell, people-- \"normal, shitty people, the kind you see everywhere, clogging streets and subways with their sagging guts and coughs and half-formed ideas and nonexistent attention spans and their fucking hats.\" [...]this book feel titrated through a mountain's worth of limestone and angst before dripping painfully out.
Newspaper Article
An inside guide to the greatest failed genius of his generation
In the end, this book is the story of a man who sat in rooms writing, and as [David Foster Wallace] himself says at one point, \"Who'd read that?\" Nonetheless, there's a lot that's telling about the wider US landscape in here: the fact that on graduation, he realised that he needed to go to grad school to get a qualification to get a teaching job to get health insurance to get the prescriptions for his antidepressants. Also telling: the astonishing amount he was prescribed. These things are not discussed; at this point, mood-altering medication is just background noise in American letters. Nor is the possibility that his depression was exacerbated by his teenage marijuana use discussed. Nor the possibility that his depression was exacerbated by feeding his brain little but itself.
Newspaper Article
Nabokov was right all along
There is no plot. Reviewers have risen heroically to the task of writing 1,000 words about a \"text\" less than 8,000 long. True, there are coherent paragraphs. There's the usual drooling over young flesh - \"nates\" crops up, his creepy, creepy word for buttocks - and tedious intellectualisations about how much he'd like to cut off his own feet (his son, in the foreword, explains that he was a martyr to ingrown toenails). He alludes to his own previous stories and describes a professor of Russian literature, \"a forlorn-looking man bored to extinction by his subject\", as [Vladimir Nabokov] was at Cornell. When this gets too action-packed, we segue into actual navel-gazing: \"I loathe my belly, that trunkful of bowels, which I have to carry around\". Write what you know, Vlad!
Newspaper Article
Join the dark side
There's some problem the British have with [Thomas Pynchon]. Of those who've heard of him, few have read him, and of those who've read him, even fewer seem able to metabolise him. When his last novel, Against the Day, was published in 2006, weighing in at an eye- watering 1,100 pages, I remember a presenter of The Today Programme taking an almost personal offence, doubting aloud whether anyone actually read this sort of thing. She stoutly added that no one she knew had been able to finish Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon's 1973 winner of the US National Book Award. And if all the friends of a Radio 4 presenter can't stomach something, well! The problem was hardly likely to lie with them.
Newspaper Article
A hint of heroism
It seems only a matter of time before Sarajevo joins this happy list. It's cheap, it's beautiful, everyone speaks English, it's bombproof -- where better for men to go to create mischief? For now, however, before easyJet and Ryanair set up direct flights, Sarajevo still hasn't been swarmed on by the Great British Horde. Its authenticity is all still intact, the disgusting street-food is their disgusting street-food.
Magazine Article
Falling for the flatlands
By the Monday the drive will have turned into that drainage ditch I've always wanted.' The British have always taken their landscaping seriously. Now there's a whole new paradigm for Capabilities Brown: where for example, do you put the portaloos? Bearing in mind that wherever you do, you'll be combing crap out of the brambles for the next six months. And then where do you put the elite portaloos? Because even festivals don't feel right without a class system.
Magazine Article