Raleigh Trevelyan
Italo Calvino has long been one of my favourite authors, and I greatly enjoyed his novel If On A Winter's Night A Traveller (Secker and Warburg), a typical intellectual tease. I also very much liked Georgina Battiscombe's study of Christina Rossetti (Constable), and her sane, cool and sympathetic approach, a welcome contrast after the silly sensationalism of an American biography of Christina some years back. I admire Mary Gordon immensely. Her second book The Company Of Women (Cape) is a novel on the grand scale, more ambitious than Final Payments and in effect an examination of the nature of love in its various forms — religious, maternal, romantic, erotic and between friends. Come to think of it, Christina Rossetti is almost a Mary Gordon character.
Previous page
