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Roula Khalaf, editor -in -chief of the FT, selects her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Graham Swift is a writer intrigued by fairly well everything that is human interest and mystery. Born in the post -war period of Lewisham – part of southern London which had undergone some of the worst damage in the city during the Blitz – with a Jewish -Russian ancestry, it remains deeply in a London novelist, open to the polyglot variety and the wonder of life in the Great Metropolis. WaterThe novel that became its name four decades ago, took place in part in Greenwich south of the Thames. Latest ordersThe novel for which he won the 1996 Booker Prize, follows a distribution of London The veterans of the war at a long march of Bermondsey in Margate, to disperse the ashes of their friend.
Twelve post-war storiesThe third collection of news from Swift, finds a dismal comedy in aging and cognitive decline while the characters are reflected variously on their past lives in the Bondocks of Crystal Palace, Walthamstow, London Docklands and elsewhere. As a rule, Swift finds its way in the mind and the heart of an impressive series of personalities.
In “Palace”, a insecure hateless left -wing father swears that the Crystal Palace of the Victorian era burned in 1936 in the hands of Oswald Mosley and his blackshirts. “I came to see that my father lived in a world of all pervasive conspiracy,” concludes his son with regret. A sort of security is nevertheless behind the capricious insecurity of his father: distinguishing the intentions of everyone stops him against the possibility of new disappointments and betrayals in life.
In “Blushes”, another performance by Bravura, a 72 -year -old respiratory disease specialist thinking about the day he caught the scarlet fever when she was a child. The memory returns to him “freshly fresh” while he went to the hospital one day during the Cavid-19 pandemic. Many stories are shaded by Cataclysm. THE Cuban missile crisis From 1962 provided the backdrop of the “fireworks”, while the blitz sparkles behind “Passport”, in which an octogenarian woman reflects on the death of her mother born in Spanish in one of the bomb attacks in London in Hitler.
Swift is a master of dialogue who is delighted with the possibilities of the human voice. “Chocolate”, a perfect story, evokes the joshing distribution of a bunch of published advertising while they remember a “very sweet” woman who worked in the confectionery. (He also presents similarities with the world of watered male camaraderie which summoned Swift Latest orders.) The whole collection is not JOCHOSE in any case. Hitler's war against the European Jewish community is the subject of “The Next Best Thing”, one of the most beautiful stories here. A young Jewish soldier in northern London arrived in Germany in 1959 to determine the fate of one of his relatives. He confronts a frightening official on polished who ostensibly avoids the use of the word “Jewish”.
The collection is tinged with a feeling of fall of loss and self -examination of an older writer – Swift is now 75 years old – thinking about his life. His prose and his precise armed prose, recalling at times of his friend Kazuo Ishiguro, has lost none of his power. Just on occasion, a stumble description (“Harridan with a horn” is too pat) but, on the whole, it is extremely readable and late; From start to finish, Twelve post-war stories is a marvel of the art of the storyteller.
Twelve post-war stories By Graham Swift Scribner £ 18.99 / Knopf $ 30, 304 pages
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