de Bernières

‘A partisan’s daughter’ van Louis de Bernières

De Britse romanschrijver Louis de Bernières heeft een nieuwe roman uit: ‘A partisan’s daughter’. Een wat stoffige man in zijn midlifecrisis ontmoet een erotiserende Joegoslavische vluchtelinge. Zij vertelt hem haar verhaal en langzaam groeien ze naar elkaar toe. Het is een verhaal van politieke gruweldaden, seksuele verlangens, vooroordelen, maar ook van liefde en medeleven, met op de achtergrond de Balkan van de jaren 80, de opkomst van Tatcher en de dood van Tito.

Gudrun De Geyter sprak met de schrijver in Amsterdam.Radio 1

Kuresihi

Hanif Kureishi - Unpublished Works, including Strangers When We Meet


Gabriel's Gift by Hanif Kureishi

A Review by Stephanie Zacharek
Powell's Books - Review-a-Day - Gabriel's Gift by Hanif Kureishi, reviewed by Salon.com
http://www.powells.com/review/2002_01_04.html

In the late '60s and early '70s, Britain, like the United States, was peopled with kids who didn't want to grow up — which might have been all right, if only they hadn't spawned. That's the gentle dark joke at the heart of Hanif Kureishi's Gabriel's Gift, a gingery novel about a bright, self-possessed 15-year-old boy who's reeling from the marital breakup of his parents, a hugely talented but washed-up guitarist and a former costume designer to rock royalty. The parents, having fallen away from the world of bohemian privilege, can't handle the bleak reality of paying rent and doing the work of getting along with one another. The son, Gabriel, has more sense than either of them but zero authority: Even boho parents — or maybe especially boho parents — cling to the hoary Old Testament decrees that parents must always be the rulers of the universe.

But that makes Gabriel's Gift sound heavier and nastier than it is: Kureishi has always been something of a hip humanist, the kind of writer who's more interested in his characters' spikes and smudges than in anything so dull as perfection or even predictability, and he brings that to bear here. Everyone has to adjust to the inhospitable adult world eventually, but there's always a secret part of us that refuses to grow up. Gabriel's Gift is a coming-of-age story that suggests that no one ever really comes of age: It's simply too heartbreaking.

Reading the signs of the time

By Anna Millar
Bookreview

SECRETS are my currency: I deal in them for a living. The secrets of desire, of what people really want, of what they fear the most. The secrets of why love is difficult, sex complicated, living painful and death so close and yet placed far away." That this is the reader's introduction to Jamal, the narrator, in Hanif Kureishi's latest social work, Something To Tell You, is little surprise.

His skill for capturing the social climate doesn't desert him in his snapshot of Seventies suburbia. "Sometimes people asked if I were 'Mediterranean', otherwise, there were few Asian people where we lived," explains the young Jamal. "Most whites considered Asians to be 'inferior', less intelligent, less everything good."

Angela's Ashes

Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt

English:

When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood."
So begins the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland. Frank's mother, Angela, has no money to feed the children since Frank's father Malachy, rarely works, and when he does he drinks his wages. Yet Malachy does nurture in Frank an appetite for the one thing he can provide: a story.
Perhaps it is a story that accounts for Frank's survival. Wearing shoes repaired with tires, begging a pig's head for Christmas dinner, and searching the pubs for his father, Frank endures poverty, near-starvation and the casual cruelty of relatives and neighbors -- yet lives to tell his tale with eloquence, exuberance and remarkable forgiveness.
Simon & Schuster

Angela's Ashes (1999): Emily Watson, Robert Carlyle, Joe Breen, Ciaran Owens, Michael Legge - PopMatters Film Review

The Poetry of Poverty
by Renee Scolaro Rathke

It must be a daunting task to translate to film a book as enormously popular as Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes. (…).

Angela's Ashes director Alan Parker addresses this facet of the filmmaking process in his "production journal," which is posted on the film's official website (www.angelasashes.com). I stumbled on Parker's journal accidentally as I browsed the website, and found it fascinating, not so much because of his rather obvious observation that directors have to make choices, but because his narrative reveals contexts for some of the particular choices he made for this film, which, in the end, often fails to capture the energy and lyricism of McCourt's writing.

Kudulthood

Kidulthood (2006) van Menhaj Huda

Kidulthood @ A-Film
Synopsis

Katie wordt gepest. Als de school wordt afgelast na haar tragische zelfmoord, wordt een groep West London tieners in moeilijkheden gedwongen hun verantwoordelijkheden op te nemen. Kidulthood heeft een achtergrond van UK hip hop en een overweldigende soundtrack met Dizzee Rascal en The Streets. Verder een opmerkelijk overtuigende rolverdeling van bijna onbekenden, waaronder de nakomelingen van Ray Winstone en Timothy Spall. Een sterk jeugddrama dat een onverschrokken portret van het harde tienerleven biedt.

Coe

Jonathan Coe geeft de lezing van de Stichting Lezen.

Beschrijving
Jonathan Coe, auteur van 'Het moordende testament' en 'De regen voor hij valt' geeft tijdens de Lezing zijn kijk op het geschreven woord. De toegang is gratis, reserveren kan via info@stichtinglezen.be. Datum: 29 april om 20 uur Locatie: FelixArchief, Oudeleeuwenrui 29, 2000 Antwerpen De Lezing is in het Engels. Op 30 april is Jonathan Coe te gast bij Passa Porta, Dansaertstraat 46, 1000 Brussel voor een live interview. Informatie en reservatie: www.passaporta.be.

Jonathan Coe, The Rotter's Club

The Rotters' Club (2001), is set in Birmingham during the 1970s and tells the story of a group of school friends working on the school magazine. It was adapted for BBC Television in 2005. A sequel, The Closed Circle, was published in 2004.
British Council

BBC - Press Office - The Rotters' Club

Based on Jonathan Coe's best-selling novel, an original three part drama from Company Pictures for BBC TWO
The Rotters' Club is a story about a group of Birmingham teenagers and their families set against a backdrop of the class conflict, racial tension, strike action - not to mention Blue Nun, prog-rock and black forest gateau - which was the social and political landscape of Seventies Britain. Much more than just a rites of passage tale, The Rotters' Club is a blend of the personal and the political, a coming-of-age drama that takes in everything from industrial disputes to the delights and confusion of first love.