“Rivers was used to missionary islands where canoes paddled out to meet the oncoming steamer, brown faces, white eyes, flashing smiles, while others gathered at the landing stage, ready to carry bags up to the mission station for a few sticks of tobacco or even sheer Christian goodwill. A cheerful picture, as long as youContinue reading “RKS Literature: Murderous Missionary Ships (Pat Barker)”
Category Archives: literature
RKS Literature: Supressed Memory and a Smack on the Leg (Pat Barker)
“Was this the supressed memory? He didn’t know. Was it trivial? Well, yes, in a way, compared with Prior’s lurid imaginings. A smack on the leg, a lesson in manliness from an over conscientious but loving father. It’s a long way from sadistic beatings, And yet it wasn’t as trivial as it seemed at first.”Continue reading “RKS Literature: Supressed Memory and a Smack on the Leg (Pat Barker)”
RKS Literature: Death and Cartography (Michael Ondaatje)
“We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden as if in caves. I wish for all of this to be marked on my body whenContinue reading “RKS Literature: Death and Cartography (Michael Ondaatje)”
RKS Literature: The Human Element and Burglary (Michael Ondaatje)
“Caravaggio was constantly diverted by the human element during burglaries. Breaking into a house during Christmas, he would become annoyed if he noted the Advent calendar had not been opened up to the date to which it should have been. He often had conversations with the various pets left alone in houses, rhetorically discussing mealsContinue reading “RKS Literature: The Human Element and Burglary (Michael Ondaatje)”
RKS Literature: Unbalanced by War (Michael Ondaatje)
“Caravaggio sits there in silence, thoughts lost among the floating notes. War has unbalanced him and he can return to no other world as he is, wearing these false limbs that morphine promises. He is a man of middle age who has never become accustomed to families. All his life he has avoided permanent intimacy.Continue reading “RKS Literature: Unbalanced by War (Michael Ondaatje)”
RKS CANADIAN Literature: What a Love Story is Not About (Michael Ondaatje)
“A love story is not about those who lose their heart but about those who, when it is stumbled upon, means the body can fool no one, can fool nothing-not the wisdom of sleep or the habit of social graces. It is a consuming of oneself and the past.” Michael Ondaatje, “The English Patient”, 1969.
RKS CANADIAN Literature: (Michael Ondaatje)Thermometer of Blood
“She never looked at herself in mirrors again. As the war got darker she received reports about how certain people she had known died. She feared the day she would remove blood from a patient’s face and discover her father or someone who had served her food across a counter on Danforth Avenue. She grewContinue reading “RKS CANADIAN Literature: (Michael Ondaatje)Thermometer of Blood”
RKS CANADIAN Literature: Shell Shocked Nurses (Michael Ondaatje)
“Nurses too became shell-shocked from the dying around them. Or from something as small as a letter. They would carry a severed arm down the hall, or swab at blood that never stopped, as if the wound were a well, and they began to believe in nothing, trusted nothing. They broke the way a manContinue reading “RKS CANADIAN Literature: Shell Shocked Nurses (Michael Ondaatje)”
RKS Literature: Yugoslavia’s Tito: One Day a Hero of the USSR The Next Its Perfidious Enemy
“The class laughed just as unanimously when the geography teacher talked about Yugoslavia. Today Tito is a “sinister and perfidious enemy”; but it was only two weeks ago that we were shown the film: “In the Mountains of Yugoslavia”, in which Marshal Tito was awarded the Order of Victory as our best friend and faithfulContinue reading “RKS Literature: Yugoslavia’s Tito: One Day a Hero of the USSR The Next Its Perfidious Enemy”
RKS Literature: The Necessity of Slave Labour in the USSR and the Future of Socialism (Vladimir Rott)
“The abolition of private property killed people’ s desire to create, to take care of themselves, to seek paths to survival and progress. The most essential part of any country’s gross national product-the contribution of each individual’s enthusiasm-was lost. By sending hundreds of thousands of Soviet people to the labour camps, the state tried toContinue reading “RKS Literature: The Necessity of Slave Labour in the USSR and the Future of Socialism (Vladimir Rott)”
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