Literary reviews by Tim Love.
Warning: Rather than reviews, these are often notes in preparation for reviews that were never finished, or pleas for help with understanding pieces. See Litref Reviews - a rationale for details.

Wednesday 16 January 2002

"Remake" by Christine Brooke-Rose (Carcanet, 1996)

Written in the 3rd person. Having worked at Bletchley Park, she looks at the past the way she used to sift the espionage reports and messages, looking for patterns to give substance to the trivia. On the last page it says "Memory intercepts the messages of a mysterious invented enemy unseen, giant knight or flaming dragon, the interceptor a speck in time facing the immensity of confrontable selves". As a child she put up with trilingual jokes; as an adult she compared the soap operas of various countries (English ones have working class people, Italian ones have doctors and lawyers). Facts and impressions are fired out sentence after sentence. "the first twenty-three years so starkly crammed and anecdotal, the second twenty-two years, one chapter". It was more like a conventional autobiography than I expected.

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