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hay_jude's review
emotional
funny
hopeful
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
4.5
This is a collection of Hilary Mantel's journalistic writing over the years and includes articles written for the London Review of Books, film reviews, her 2017 Reith Lectures on writing historical fiction and other pieces. As ever with Mantel her pieces are always intelligent, often funny and usually wise.I read this having read a poorly written bestseller of my book group and her sparkling prose was like balm to the soul following that reading experience.Having read her novels from the start of her writing career onwards I was able to meet her in person briefly, when I went to see the RSC dramatisation of her first two Cromwell novels at the theatre. I thanked her for all the reading pleasure she had given me and was able to say how glad I was that she had finally hit the big time in terms of recognition and success - and she gave me a big hug! How sad that she died before her time.
graywacke's review against another edition
reflective
medium-paced
4.25
I was a little worried about reading a bunch of essays I might not be interested in, but this turns out to be captivating stuff. The most mundane, her movie reviews, are entertaining and include some fun movies. But there are simply some lightning essays in here. Many are about the Tudors and Wolf Hall. Some about her other books, especially A Place of Greater Safety. Some are on overlooked women authors. She was an excellent writer, able to make her essays playful in a writerly way. Sometimes she could be very humble, but always witty. Sometimes she would be starkly assured and confident, almost presenting divine proclamations. I found that a little strange. But overall, I loved the collection and its richness.
silvareader's review against another edition
challenging
funny
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
4.0
amandacreadsbooks's review against another edition
emotional
funny
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
5.0
paracyclops's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
funny
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
This book will probably be read by those that love Hilary Mantel's fiction. It's hard for me to form an objective opinion, as every beautifully crafted sentence here seems to cast light on her practice as a novelist. I know her writing only from the extraordinary Cromwell trilogy, and few of the observations she makes in this book, however apparently unrelated, seem irrelevant to the way that those books were made. However, the many and disparate pieces collected here are worth reading even if you've never set eyes on Mantel's fiction.
She thinks about a lot of things, and she thinks about them all interestingly. I don't always agree with her about these things. She's fond of making statements about what novels should be like that exclude vast swathes of entertaining and enjoyable fiction from consideration, but even when I think she's mistaken, she always offers a perspective that challenges me to think very carefully about what I think. And I should note, that even though this dogmatism verges sometimes on intellectual snobbery, she is also appreciative of the virtues of an entertaining mystery, or a ghost story. A selection of her film reviews is included in A memoir of my former self, and in these she is as willing to consider an action movie like Paul Verhoeven's Robocop on its merits, as she is something ostensibly more serious, like Gabriel Axel's Babette's feast.
Also included are the five Reith Lectures she gave in 2017. If, as many readers will be, you're looking for something juicy on the writing of the Cromwell trilogy, then this is the meat. As you would expect, she is extremely interesting on the complex interrelationships between history, historiography, memory, documentation, experience, and historical fiction. But this is not simply a set of intellectual of questions for her—it's something in which she was viscerally and emotionally engaged. She is utterly convinced of the reality of the people on whom her characters are based. She is also rigorously careful to distinguish between those real people, the historical figures that are formed when historians extract their traces from the documentary record, and the fictional characters that people her books. But it is that unshakeable belief in them as people that enables her, in my opinion, to produce such an incredibly compelling account of the experience of being them. It is always one version, and like a professional historian, she is never blind to all the other versions, but what she puts into a narrative is a singular and ineluctable individual.
She also writes movingly of her archival research, of the voices that have spoken to her out of the days that her novels are set in. In 'The Other king' she discusses (movingly) George Cavendish's contemporary life of Thomas Wolsey, which was a major source for her work. She is clear that these people are gone, and cannot be reconstructed in any definitive sense; but she is nevertheless able to paint an extremely vivid picture of the ways that their lives made irreducibly particular impressions on the domain of letters. Cavendish's book is full of the idiosyncracies of its subject, some of which made their way into Mantel's, but tells us perhaps as much about Cavendish as it does about Wolsey. I never knew Mantel, and I never will, but these are her traces, less distanced than those to be found in her fiction, and they have helped me to make a version of her that is as particular, if not as complete, as the real human that wrote these words.
She thinks about a lot of things, and she thinks about them all interestingly. I don't always agree with her about these things. She's fond of making statements about what novels should be like that exclude vast swathes of entertaining and enjoyable fiction from consideration, but even when I think she's mistaken, she always offers a perspective that challenges me to think very carefully about what I think. And I should note, that even though this dogmatism verges sometimes on intellectual snobbery, she is also appreciative of the virtues of an entertaining mystery, or a ghost story. A selection of her film reviews is included in A memoir of my former self, and in these she is as willing to consider an action movie like Paul Verhoeven's Robocop on its merits, as she is something ostensibly more serious, like Gabriel Axel's Babette's feast.
Also included are the five Reith Lectures she gave in 2017. If, as many readers will be, you're looking for something juicy on the writing of the Cromwell trilogy, then this is the meat. As you would expect, she is extremely interesting on the complex interrelationships between history, historiography, memory, documentation, experience, and historical fiction. But this is not simply a set of intellectual of questions for her—it's something in which she was viscerally and emotionally engaged. She is utterly convinced of the reality of the people on whom her characters are based. She is also rigorously careful to distinguish between those real people, the historical figures that are formed when historians extract their traces from the documentary record, and the fictional characters that people her books. But it is that unshakeable belief in them as people that enables her, in my opinion, to produce such an incredibly compelling account of the experience of being them. It is always one version, and like a professional historian, she is never blind to all the other versions, but what she puts into a narrative is a singular and ineluctable individual.
She also writes movingly of her archival research, of the voices that have spoken to her out of the days that her novels are set in. In 'The Other king' she discusses (movingly) George Cavendish's contemporary life of Thomas Wolsey, which was a major source for her work. She is clear that these people are gone, and cannot be reconstructed in any definitive sense; but she is nevertheless able to paint an extremely vivid picture of the ways that their lives made irreducibly particular impressions on the domain of letters. Cavendish's book is full of the idiosyncracies of its subject, some of which made their way into Mantel's, but tells us perhaps as much about Cavendish as it does about Wolsey. I never knew Mantel, and I never will, but these are her traces, less distanced than those to be found in her fiction, and they have helped me to make a version of her that is as particular, if not as complete, as the real human that wrote these words.
thebadactress's review against another edition
The subject matter was a bit too random and wide ranging. Also very detailed. Also the changes in narrators was a bit jarring in audiobook form.