CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
Latest editorial
Letters From Latin America: November 7, 2019
Reviews of poetry and fiction by Jorge Eduardo Eielson, Carmen Gimenez Smith and Brenda Lozano
Outstanding: Carmen Gimenez Smith
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
PERUVIAN poet and artist Jorge Eduardo Eielson (1924-2006) travelled to Italy in 1951 for a summer holiday and decided to settle in Rome, where he wrote his poetic masterpiece Room in Rome (Cardboard House, £10).
Available for the first time in English, this collection shows Eielson’s ability to knot together many of the poet’s main themes as “quipus” (“talking knots”), recording devices made from strings historically used by cultures in Andean South America.
Eielson weaves personal history with geographic location, homosexual desire with longing, past and future, in a fashion that is as playful as it is profound.
Similar stories
ALAN MORRISON recommends a consummate, heart-warming collection about a working-class upbringing in the industrial north-east
KEN COCKBURN guides us through a survey of Chekov’s early short fiction, and the groundwork it laid for his later masterpieces
MEIC BIRTWISTLE offers an appreciation of the renaissance man GARETH MILES
JAN WOOLF finds out where she came from and where she’s going amid Pete Townshend’s tribute to 1970s youth culture