Reviews on The Review

The eyes of Mayakovsky’s lover and muse, Lily Brik, bore out at you from the cover of this important new edition of Mayakovsky’s long poem, Pro Eto. Lily Brik occurs elsewhere in the book; in the text, which she haunts, but also in the astonishing photomontages for the poem by Alexander Rodchenko, which are published [...]

German feature Jerichow made its UK debut at 2009’s Edinburgh International Film Festival on 19 June, and is arguably more appealing and straightforwardly enjoyable than many of the more high-profile premieres screened there so far.
Benno Furmann plays brooding ex-soldier Thomas, deep in debt and with few prospects, who moves into his mother’s country house [...]

Coming just four months after the UK release of his last film, Revolutionary Road, Away We Go is something of a departure for respected film and theatre director Sam Mendes.  The compositional beauty and sinister, or, at least, restless, undertone for which he is renowned have been replaced with single-take scenes and light-hearted camaraderie between [...]

The iconic beginning to this film – Polish refugees run from both sides onto a bridge, one side running from the Russians, the others running from the Germans, and the equally iconic, relentless slaughter which end the film, will be well known to anyone who has looked at the reviews of this remarkable document.  Equally [...]

In 1979, Donald Davie wrote that ‘Briggflatts is where English poetry has got to, it is what English poets must assimilate and go on from.’ Why hasn’t that happened?
One reason for the critical occlusion of Bunting is that late-modernism itself can be a bit of a cul-de-sac. On the DVD that accompanies the text, [...]

Science and literature are both ways of describing the world. This makes the idea of Samantha Hunt’s novel about the scientist Nikola Tesla seem very natural. Or it should do. At its best, The Invention of Everything Else describes the world in such beautiful detail that it makes you want all fiction to contain an [...]

Samantha Harvey’s debut occupies a territory somewhere inbetween Kazuo Ishiguro’s “The Unconsoled” and Mark Haddon’s “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time”. Like the former, the reader is plunged headlong into a confusing, surreal mindscape in which nothing is as it seems and nobody is to be trusted. Like the latter, at [...]

Samarasan’s debut novel in its ambition and depth is certainly commendable: Evening is the Whole Day interrogates the tensions between public and private life for the predominantly Tamil Indian diaspora who have settled in Malaysia. The novel centres around a dysfunctional Tamil family living in the city of Ipoh, and the “oldest-eldest” sister’s desire for [...]

This rich, arresting debut depicts the fortunes and failures of a merchant family in post (and briefly, pre) colonial Malaysia. Whilst echoes of similar works abound –reviews have frequently invoked Rushdie and Roy – Samarasan deftly avoids cliché and the liberal hand-wringing often present in exotic, colonial narratives. Yet, whilst any analysis of the novel [...]