Enright’s verdict
With the nation’s financial ills being analysed by experts left, right and centre, it’s interesting to get a writer’s perspective on the Irish fiasco.
In the essay Sinking by Inchesin the current issue of the London Review of Books, novelist Anne Enright gives her take on our recession, charting it from 2008.
By November last, everyone was afraid: “Everyone I ask knows two or three people who have lost their jobs, and any number who are stuck in houses they don’t want to live in for the rest of their lives, some of them with partners they no longer love.’’
Looking back on the property boom she conjures up a time when house auctions were a kind of blood sport in south Dublin.
“There were women who spent their lives going to them, to get high on the smell of money and other people’s pain. It was like living in a casino.” And telling the truth was unlucky, hexed, taboo. “Careless talk cost jobs. If the bubble burst it would be your fault for calling it a bubble, because, at the end of the day, it’s not an economy, it’s a mood.’’
Home from holidays last July , she tells of the taxi man who said that the flights from Italy and France were the only ones worth meeting; that the package holiday was dead. “Things happen more slowly to the middle classes. We are not so much an income bracket, as a speed,’’ she writes. It’s taken Ireland more than two years, says Enright, to get real .
London Review of Books, Vol 32. No 1. See lrb.co.uk
Tolstoy’s year
Tolstoy fans are going to have a whale of a time this year, the 100th anniversary of his death. March will see publication of Anniversary Essayson Tolstoy edited by Donna Tussing Orwin from Cambridge University Press, taking stock of current scholarship on the author of War and Peacea century after he died.
Tussing Orwin, a professor at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature in the University of Toronto and President of the Tolstoy Society, is also behind a conference celebrating the anniversary at the novelist’s famous estate of Yasnaya Polyana, which houses his library stacked with books in 39 languages.
The Seventh International Academic Conference “Leo Tolstoy and World Literature ’’ takes place there from August 11-15.
Penguin Classics has also been working towards this landmark for years and has new translations out of his major works. On film, there's a drama about his final days, The Last Station, which has its UK premiere in February.
Tolstoy died aged 82 while in transit at the remote railway station of Astapovo, questing about life and death to the end: “What about the peasants? How do peasants die?”
The film, based on a novel by Jay Parini, stars Christopher Plummer (as Tolstoy), Helen Mirren and James McAvoy. Another film, a documentary called Leo Tolstoy: Genius Alive, with footage of the man himself, is also in train for this year.
Eastern promise
With links bteween Ireland and China growing daily, there is a timely lunchtime lecture series scheduled at the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin to be given by scholars Jerusha McCormack and John G Blair.
The dates are February 11th, 18th and 25th and March 4th ,11th and 18th. Each lecture commences at 1.10pm. They are free; no booking is required.
See cbl.ie for more details
