A report by Caleb Sivyer on our final event for the 2015/16 series of Cardiff BookTalk, to mark the bicentennial of the composition of Frankenstein.
Tag: English literature
Frankenstein Resources at Biblion: The Boundless Library
A number of excellent resources related to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein can be found at Biblion: The Boundless Library, which gives users access to The New York Public Library’s impressive collection. Click on the link below to view images relating to Frankenstein on the silver screen: … Continue reading Frankenstein Resources at Biblion: The Boundless Library
Trailer for Jack Pierce, The Maker of Monsters (2015)
Another little morsel for you before our upcoming monstrous BookTalk event, a film-screening and discussion of James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931), on the 30th June. Below is a trailer for a documentary that focuses on the man behind the incredible monster make-up, Jack Pierce. Pierce worked … Continue reading Trailer for Jack Pierce, The Maker of Monsters (2015)
Poster Designs for Frankenstein (1931)
There are many wonderful poster designs for James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931).
Film Trailer for Frankenstein (1931)
To whet your appetites in anticipation of our next BookTalk event on the 30th June 2016, here is a trailer of James Whale’s 1931 movie adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein:
BookTalk screening, 30 June 2016: Frankenstein (1931)
To celebrate the 200th anniversary of the composition of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, our June 2016 event will be a screening of the iconic 1931 film adaptation directed by James Whale.
Meet the Authors—Gaynor Arnold and John Harding: Event Report
A report by Catherine Paula Han on the fourth BookTalk of the 2015/16 season, which took place on 7 March 2016: Meet the Authors—Gaynor Arnold and John Harding.
Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending (2011): Event Review
A report by Catherine Han on the third BookTalk of the 2015/16 season, which took place on 11 Feb 2016: a discussion of Julian Barnes’s Booker prize-winning The Sense of an Ending (2011).
Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending: Excerpt #4
I remember a period in late adolescence when my mind would make itself drunk with images of adventurousness. This is how it will be when I grow up. I shall go there, do this, discover that, love her, and then her and her and her. I shall live as people in novels live and have lived. Which ones I was not sure, only that passion and danger, ecstasy and despair (but then more ecstasy) would be in attendance. However … who said that thing about ‘the littleness of life that art exaggerates’? There was a moment in my late twenties when I admitted that my adventurousness had long since petered out. I would never do those things adolescence had dreamed about. Instead, I mowed my lawn, I took holidays, I had my life.
But time … how time first grounds us and then confounds us. We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them. Time … give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.
—Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending (Jonathan Cape, 2011), p. 93
From a review of The Sense of An Ending
Like so many of Barnes’s narrators, Tony Webster is resigned to his ordinariness; even satisfied with it, in a bloody-minded way. In one light, his life has been a success: a career followed by comfortable retirement, an amiable marriage followed by amicable divorce, a child seen safely into her own domestic security. On harsher inspection, ‘I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and succeeded—and how pitiful that was.’ Barnes is brutally incisive on the diminishments of age: now that the sense of his own ending is coming into focus, Tony apprehends that ‘the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss’, that he has already experienced the first death: that of the possibility of change … Barnes excels at colouring everyday reality with his narrator’s unique subjectivity, without sacrificing any of its vivid precision: only he could invest a discussion about hand-cut chips in a gastropub with so much wry poignancy.
