How To Read Elfriede Jelinek

By Tim Parks
In her avowedly autobiographical novel The Piano Teacher, the Austrian author Elfriede Jelinek has her alter ego Erika Kohut engage in a variety of voyeuristic activities. She pays to sit in a booth at a peep show, smells a tissue into which the man before her has masturbated, and watches attentively as the [...]

Literary perspectives: The Netherlands

“Profound Holland” and the new Dutch
By Margot Dijkgraaf
The liberal, atheist era has come to end in the Netherlands and contemporary Dutch literature reflects that, writes critic Margot Dijkgraaf. The new need for security is reflected in the work of two novelists in particular: Jan Siebelink, whose fiction, free of references to contemporary life, evokes the [...]

Ivan Turgenev

By Henry James (1903)
WHEN the mortal remains of Ivan Turgenev were about to be transported from Paris for interment in his own country, a short commemorative service was held at the Gare du Nord. Ernest Renan and Edmond About, standing beside the train in which his coffin had been placed, bade farewell in the name [...]

Alfred Hitchcock – Master of Paradox

by Ken Mogg
At one moment below I make passing reference to how, in Hitchcock’s radio version of The Lodger in 1940, Herbert Marshall played both the likely killer and the story’s objective narrator. I call this “a dualism which is itself suggestive”. I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but it’s possible I was [...]

Borges finds his Boswell

Adolfo Bioy Casares had his first conversation with Jorge Luis Borges in 1931 or 1932, when Bioy was about eighteen and Borges was thirty-two. From then on they enjoyed an extraordinarily intense literary friendship which lasted until Borges’s death in 1986. In 1947 Bioy started to write a diary, in which he recorded the often [...]