GatesyRead

Last year I read and wrote a short reviews of A Moveable Feast , and The Snows of Kilimanjaro , both of which I thoroughly enjoyed. But this book is something else. I read it after reading Paul Preston’s The Spanish Civil War . Now being outside of living memory, the events of this terrible period in Spanish history (and European history) struck me afresh in terms of their terror. For readers at least, the suffering and bravery of Spanish people, and the witnesses to this suffering in terms of various writers, artists, journalists and international volunteers is so well documented that you might ask what a novel can bring, especially when read now. In my case, at least, reading Hemingway after gaining some understanding of the period through wider reading really helped me to imagine and to empathise, and it’s clear that Hemingway wanted this, as well as a broader, more objective view than some might credit. I’m reluctant to try to really review a book that is such a known classic, so I

For one interested in exploring Australian expatriate experiences, the famous essay by Patrick White ‘A Prodigal Son’ (1958) provides a good “in” to this memoir. In the essay, White asks “was there anything to prevent me packing my bag and leaving like Alister Kershaw and so many other artists?” His answer is that as a writer, Australia helped the colours to come flooding back to his palette, and in a Romantic touch, writing became “a struggle to create fresh forms out of the rocks and stones of trees”. Flaws in the Glass could be said to extend these key themes, but in a more personal way. He writes, or publishes the memoir, in 1981, and by now he is a Nobel Prize winning author, aged nearly 70, open about his long-standing partnership with Manoly Lascaris in a manner which in the year of 2016 sounds very contemporary. Like Tim Winton’s Island Home , White lets us know that it is the land that draws him back home and inspires him to write. Although Winton doesn’t say it in the sa