Who'll come a-waltzing Matilda with me?

[sovay]

Claude Choules, last known combat veteran of the first world war.

I finished reading Pat Barker's The Ghost Road (1995) yesterday. It is less of a novel than its predecessors, Regeneration (1991) and The Eye in the Door (1993); what it is, it becomes clear only in the last few pages, is a ritual, a sending-on, an exorcism. There was a need for it. I was reading about events still tied by memory to the living world.

They have gone on now.

Comments

[cucumberseed.livejournal.com]

They have gone on now.

It was inevitable, but I don't like it one bit.

[sovay]

It was inevitable, but I don't like it one bit.

Now it really does become a ghost. PJ Harvey hits the zeitgeist again.

[strange-selkie.livejournal.com]

Only Florence Green still living, her contributions disputed, also 110. *sighs*

As an inappropriate public service announcement, Traditional Medicinals' Breathe Easy tea is... um... it's...

Hwark.

[sovay]

Only Florence Green still living, her contributions disputed, also 110.

Oh, interesting: I didn't see her mentioned. I will have to look her up.

Hwark.

. . . congratulations.

[helivoy.livejournal.com]

Sebastien Japrisot's A Very Long Engagement is close kin to the Barker trilogy.

[sovay]

Sebastien Japrisot's A Very Long Engagement is close kin to the Barker trilogy.

I will check it out. Do you recommend the movie also?

[helivoy.livejournal.com]

The book has a determined and willful hero who does not let her polio interfere with her life plus a vivid constellation of supporting characters. It is also a layered mystery that is presented non-linearly.

The film was remarkably faithful to the book and shot in the sepia tones of an old photoalbum. If you like the book, you will like the film, provided you also like Audrey Tautou who plays the main role.

[ron-drummond.livejournal.com]

I haven't read the novel but I love the movie -- it's a masterpiece, in my humble opinion. After seeing it, I wanted to read Pat Barker's trilogy, but I haven't yet, I suppose because I have some aversion to seeing depictions of or reading about the graphic realities of war, which is the only reason why I haven't yet rewatched A Very Long Engagement. (helivoy's comments make me want to read Japrisot's novel too; I'm embarrassed to admit that I had forgotten the film was based on a novel.) And yet it does seem that sometimes we must confront these witnesses to our species' harsher realities, lest we forget them or fail to ever recognize or recall them in the first place. I'm intrigued by your description of The Ghost Road as ritual or exorcism. It reminds me of how I felt about the greatest theater production I've ever experienced, The Winter's Tale at Shakespeare and Company in Lenox last September: it struck me that the play, and that production of it, was a ritual whose purpose and gestural summa and affect was to cure the human breast of the discognitive poison that so utterly darkens its first half.

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Someday no one will march there at all...

I grieve.

Nine

[sovay]

I grieve.

This is most history.

[kenjari.livejournal.com]

I loved Pat Barker's trilogy, even (or perhaps especially) when it was grim going. I read it in 2004, when our present wars were new, and it resonated with me so much.

[sovay]

I read it in 2004, when our present wars were new, and it resonated with me so much.

I had never heard of the books before the last week in April, when I found Regeneration on the used-book table that sometimes appears across the street from Burdick's. I loved it instantly. I loved The Eye in the Door. I am not sure I can love The Ghost Road, but it deserves its Booker. They were books I didn't know I needed. I am going to try Union Street next, and maybe Border Crossing or Life Class, but her other novels will have to be preternatural to displace them.

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

Claude Choules, last known combat veteran of the first world war.

May he rest in peace.

Thank you for sharing the news.

[sovay]

Thank you for sharing the news.

Of course. I heard from shirei_shibolim.