Amanda Denny

Colour balance and composition

Test Still Life

Charles Baudelaire. From The Flowers of Evil

Series

Reminded me of the poisons used to kill in 

Over his 22 books, the Japanese novelist has patented a brand of fiction that allows the “boundary between reality and unreality” to bend, blur or warp. For long stretches, his painstaking naturalism plods along, nerdily engrossed in (say) the ingredients of someone’s breakfast, or the mechanical defects of vintage Jaguar cars. Then we will drop down a rabbit-hole to emerge on an otherworldly terrain of fable and mystery. Along with these swerves into the supernatural, Murakami’s free-form eclecticism scrambles distinctions between pop and high culture. His riffs mash up sensationalism and sublimity; the banal and bizarre. And, just as he straddles barriers dividing high art from mass entertainment, so he suspends borders between east and west. A fascinating aside in Killing Commendatore floats the idea that “the concept of Japanese art” only came into being after Japan’s renewed exposure to western styles.

“The palm of good letter-writing has been universally awarded to the fair sex.” — Etiquette of Good Society, 1893.For Victorian ladies, th...