Most Read... Rebecca WattsThe Cult of the Noble Amateur
(PN Review 239)
John McAuliffeBill Manhire in Conversation with John McAuliffe
(PN Review 259)
Eavan BolandA Lyric Voice at Bay
(PN Review 121)
Patricia CraigVal Warner: A Reminiscence
(PN Review 259)
Vahni CapildeoOn Judging Prizes, & Reading More than Six Really Good Books
(PN Review 237)
Tim Parksin conversation with Natalia Ginzburg
(PN Review 49)
Next Issue Hal Coase 'Ochre Pitch' Gregory Woods 'On Queerness' Kirsty Gunn 'On Risk! Carl Phillips' Galina Rymbu 'What I Haven't Written' translated by Sasha Dugdale Gabriel Josipovici 'No More Stories' Valerie Duff-Strautmann 'Anne Carson's Wrong Norma'
Poems Articles Interviews Reports Reviews Contributors
PN Review 275
PN Review Substack

This report is taken from PN Review 240, Volume 44 Number 4, March - April 2018.

These Trivial Distinctions Frank Kuppner
Dragged in, rather against my will, to an obviously hopeless churchy jumble sale, by one of the eleven or twelve most intriguing people in the entire world – albeit an autonomous agent at present firmly in the grip of a no doubt transient passion (for what, my dear Tristanne, is not transient?) for exotic fabrics – I find to my astonishment that there is indeed something hidden deep within one of these weary, much-buffeted cardboard boxes that I am suddenly eager to buy. Yes. A small book called, I confess, Sayings of the Saints – collected by Annie Matheson (Eveleigh Nash, never heard of them, 1908). Not an area I am very likely to do any further research in now, I should guess – (and for the general health of one’s heart, head, health and habit, one surely ought not to go about reading only those glorious views which one already agrees with?) – but, more than anything else, this little book takes me instantly back to the world, physical and spiritual, of my ever more precariously-sited grandmother – my mother’s mother. Can it really, already, be over fifty years ago that I used to visit her in a neat little not quite poverty-stricken flat just round the corner from more or less hereabouts? (Yes, my lovely (if somewhat non-existent) children. Yes; it certainly can.)

No amount of cold probability theorising and mere absence of actual evidence could quite dispel the irrational feeling that gripped me as soon as I first set eyes on this small book: the sense ...


Searching, please wait... animated waiting image