Last summer, in line with a tradition I’ve kept most years over the past two decades, I spent a couple of weeks in Europe. Every day or two, I recorded and shared experiences and observations on Facebook as my trip unfolded. It’s best to record these thoughts and reflections as they happen, as the memories and fleeting moments of the…
Christopher Adam Posts
An imposing glass and steel building and the unfeeling multinational financier who inhabits it — both more frigid than the coming Scandinavian winter — stand in contrast to a ragtag lot of British expatriates who live in Stockholm and are thoroughly dependent on the amoral, oppressive Erik Krogh’s business empire. The English in this novel are mostly pathetic characters. They…
Sunday, December 15th started with a visit to the National Gallery of Canada. I should go more often, especially as I live barely four kilometres away — and anyhow, the times are such that reminders are sometimes needed that Canada is worthy of preserving. The gallery’s ghostly Rideau Chapel, where disembodied voices sing and whisper, never falls out of vogue.…
Ian Gillies, who directed the play Guilty Conscience at the Ottawa Little Theatre, poses a question: what does justice look like? Well, it looks like theatre, Mr. Gillies. I attended the matinee this Sunday afternoon of the 1985 play by Richard Levinson and William Link. While billed a suspense, it’s sprinkled generously with light, comic moments. Arthur, played by David…
Muriel Spark was 86 years old when her witty, biting novel The Finishing School was released. The novel crowned an immensely productive writing career. We meet Rowland Mahler, the young founder of a small, dubious private school in Switzerland. His growing jealousy of a clever 17-year old student drives him to madness. Rowland is an aspiring writer and teaches creative…
Muriel Spark’s dark and casually brutal 1970 novel, The Driver’s Seat, throws the reader off balance. The boundary between victim and perpetrator is all but erased. Everyone seems distorted — as though we’re seeing the world through a funhouse mirror. Lise, a 34 year old multilingual office worker at an accounting firm in northern Europe, embarks on a solo vacation…
The people and places in Graham Greene’s 1973 novel The Honorary Consul are shadows of their former selves. They struggle to retain or regain their humanity. We meet the priest who becomes a kidnapper, the novelist residing in a city that doesn’t read, the alcoholic honorary consul who knows his position is a sham, the fatherless British Latin American doctor…
The city worker carried on with his duties moments before the eclipse — the one that a continent had awaited enthusiastically. A dozen people and their dogs gathered in Ottawa’s Richelieu Park with sunglasses, eclipse glasses, and phones. The worker rode in on his tractor, singularly focused on his task at hand. One by one he removed the buckets from…
Essayist Shirley Hazzard’s memoir on her friendship with Graham Greene and the expatriate colony on the Italian island of Capri is a substantive and reflective read, in spite of its brevity. It’s a lyrical account of something and someone long vanished, written by an author to whom “it seemed time that a woman should write of Graham Greene.” At the…
A fledgling novelist in his twenties writes a letter to one of the bestselling authors of the twentieth century. He not only receives a response, but he’s also invited to the author’s apartment for drinks. So begins an unexpected friendship between British author Graham Greene and a young American, Michael Mewshaw, in the early 1970s. It would persist across countries…