Nothing can harm me now (except stingers) As I immersed myself in books about the island’s past, I started seeing the small events of my life as stages in a larger military campaign. Living in Malta was giving me a siege mentality. My conflicts were fought, not with Turks, but with the Genus insect. Where other places have seasons of weather, Malta had seasons of insects: enormous springtime...
One People by Guy Kennaway Cousins Cove is a real village, but the stories in Guy Kennaway’s comic novel are fiction, gathered during his first ten years as an idle British expat in Jamaica. “If you travel to the parishes of St James, Hanover and Westmoreland,” he writes, “you will not find the characters in these pages, but will find their joy, friendliness, strength and defiance in the people...
Zejtun church from my roof It was just 6am when I slipped out the door for the first time, jet-lagged, pale and squinting in the harsh island sun. A cacophony of tiny birds chattered in the morning cafe of a tree. Pigeons circled the village in a cloud that sounded like bedsheets flapping on a clothesline. One of their number insisted on occupying the toilet off our courtyard, and for a...
Looking across the courtyard to the tower – the door of my study straight ahead Nighttime in the palazzo held its own magic. We often took a nightcap in the living room, after the day’s work and reading was done: gin to slake the summer heat, or a winter whiskey to drive the damp from our bones. I liked to take my glass up to the roof at those times — down that cavernous arched...
That time I lived in a palazzo For several years I lived a secluded life on the island of Malta. The house we took was a sprawling palazzo where the walls had a chalky tang, as yellow as aged cheese. It was the first thing I noticed when I walked in the door, and I noticed it again every time I returned from a trip. It was the dry dusty scent of time. Time passed slowly, and in silence. An...
Sophie Haydock In the waning decades of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, fin de siècle Vienna became a crucible of creativity. Many of the artistic movements which shaped Western thought in the 20th century began in this remarkable melting pot of cultures and influences. Austro-Germans, Czechs, Ruthenians, Serbs, Croats, Bosnians and Slovenians rubbed shoulders in the streets, and the coffee houses...
Lviv, 2016 The Ukraine war feels close here. Not as close as it must in bordering countries like Poland, Moldova, Romania and Hungary, but much closer than it would back home. Berlin is 800km from Ukraine. To put this distance into perspective for friends in Canada, it’d be a bit like living in Ottawa and seeing war break out in Windsor or Sault Ste. Marie. Vladimir Putin’s massive invasion...
Carole Angier (Photo by Roderick Field) W.G. Sebald has been described as “a writer of almost unclassifiable originality”. You’d be just as likely to encounter his “essayistic semi-fiction” under travel literature, history or fiction. It is all of these things, and none of these things. Sebald wrote about the plight of emigrants, and in particular, emigrants from the Holocaust. His...
Cultural appropriation or just how people dress at a Japanese onsen? Of all the bizarre transgressions used to shame social media foes in our increasingly hysterical society, the concept of ‘cultural appropriation’ is surely the most confused. The idea that you can somehow steal (for that is what ‘appropriate’ means in this context) someone’s culture is silly even by academic standards, and...
Personal Landscapes seems to be growing a following. The word is spreading slowly but surely… An unbending onslaught of babble about books. A cacophony of cultured conversation. Voice from another room: This tiresome trireme of tomfoolery isn’t helping. Fine. Be like that. I just wanted to let you know the podcast has been added to this carefully curated list over at Nomad Flag ==> The Best...