pickI was just 10 when Mandela was released from prison, so he‘s always been a name in the background for me. I was surprised to find that he was not above political violence if necessary, or working with communists. In many ways he seems a bit of an anomaly in the ‘Revered Figure Dept.‘
The storytelling is compelling, told simply, but engagingly. I particularly enjoyed the early sections about his childhood. And the language.
What are you reading on this lovely Sunday evening? ☀️🤓
“I am writing in order to take charge of the story of my childhood and my childlessness; and in order to locate myself, if not within a body, then in the narrow space between one letter and the next, between the lines where the ghosts of meaning are.”
“You need to find yourself, in the maze of social expectation, the thickets of memory: just which bits of you are left intact?”
“I was (and am) unsure about how I am related to my old self, or to myself from year to year.”
“It was afternoon: that time, around three o‘clock, when a day seems to pause and yawn, before stretching itself and ambling towards teatime.”
“Since then I have always been addicted to something or other, usually something there‘s no support group for. Semicolons, for instance, I can never give up for more than two hundred words at a time.”
pickHave you ever wanted to burst into a round of applause at the end of a book? God, this was so good.
Hilary Mantel‘s memoir isn‘t especially uplifting. Her story is shaped by institutional — specifically, medical — neglect. It makes the pleasure I took from being welcomed inside her brain, where I could luxuriate in the craft of her sentences, feel almost shameful. I‘m choosing to feel wonderstruck (and a bit star-struck), instead.
What a writer!
“I'm only human, and I have no doubt Spock will outlive me by many years. I can only hope that, once in a while, when people look at Spock's visage, they might sometimes think of me.”
- Leonard Nimoy 🖖 LLAP
