The 1930 novel Vile Bodies is where we truly experience Evelyn Waugh’s humour, his masterful dialogue and his searing commentary on high society in interwar Britain. Much like The Loved One or Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies reflects on serious and uncomfortable subject matter through satire and by channelling the absurd. At the heart of the novel is Adam Fenwick-Symes,…
Christopher Adam Posts
Canadian author Kathy Clark’s new novel Ivan’s Choice tells a Holocaust story set in a country four thousand miles away. The Holocaust remains the most jarring period in living memory, at least in the West, but a memory that is fading as the number of elderly survivors dwindle. These two aspects of the novel’s setting — a distant time and…
The late Trappist monk Thomas Merton’s autobiographical work The Seven Storey Mountain reads like a coming-of-age story, a theological reflection and sometimes like a novel sprinkled with wry humour, wit and tragedy. One of Merton’s contemporaries was British novelist Evelyn Waugh. We know that as a young man, Merton read and enjoyed Waugh’s novels. Like Waugh, Merton was a convert…
Iconic twentieth century author Graham Greene referred to some of his works somewhat unfairly as “entertainments,” and among these are The Third Man and The Fallen Idol — two novellas published as one volume by Penguin. The Third Man is, in some ways, an archetypal mid-century detective mystery and The Fallen Idol is a psychological thriller. But Greene takes such care…
I used to buy my shirts and pants here. Today I came to this old Sears department store to cast my ballot in the advance vote for Canada’s federal election. Sears shuttered its Canadian operations four years ago and this cavernous department store at St. Laurent Mall in Ottawa’s east end has been closed ever since. Most of the store’s…
I parked my car behind the Cathedral and then went on an eight kilometres walk through Lowertown, continuing along the Capital Pathway, past fishermen hoping for good fortune, circling back to the Market to visit merchants happy to see me, and then buying lemon gelato from Casa di Moni. Here and there, locals strolled in their summer clothes past potted…
The featured letter in this past weekend’s Ottawa Citizen is from Patricia Willoughby, who captures well the value of café culture. The same extends to bistros and pubs too, as places that can become a “second home,” especially to those living in downtown apartments. I wrote more than one conference paper and bits of my PhD dissertation in the ornate…
This little collection of poems is very much a product of our times, but with a nod to a bygone era too. Through social media, Australian poet David Tensen invited his readers to submit to him their stories of loss, alienation and trauma — narratives that he then committed to transforming into poetry. As the poet is an avid collector…
The author of this novel exploring the harsh realities of addiction is an inmate at a prison in Kentucky. With the help of friends on the outside, Matthew Epperson self-published a book presenting the tragedy of lives lost to substance abuse. One of the more striking features of a narrative dotted with gritty, uncomfortable scenes is the authentic voice that…
As we consider and reconsider the role of social media in shaping public discourse, here’s a quote from twentieth century literary critic Lionel Trilling on fiction as a tool of introspection — an area where online echo chambers typically fail: “For our time the most effective agent of the moral imagination has been the novel of the last two hundred…