![]() Luke Campbell back to the possibility of himself. ![]() This harsh and soulful novel brings Capt. Everything leaves its trace, and we are inheritors of one another’s secrets. He witnessed her spirit survive a series of trials he had never known about, and it made him love her more, while doubting the strength and consistency of men, including himself.” Nothing is ever gone. On a different kind of mission, he mines what he can: Why did she abandon her considerable gifts? Who was the mysterious man - Luke’s grandfather - for whom she gave up her life? Luke reads her letters and unearths her old photographs (notably images of the Beatles in August 1962 at the Fleetwood Marine), “a privileged onlooker, wanting to make the connections and miss nothing that might bring her story to him as something he could keep. . . Luke takes his intermittently lucid gran on a road trip to Blackpool, a place that figures prominently in her memory, bits and pieces of her buried history shaken loose like sediment from bone. Illuminations Paperback Octoby Arthur Rimbaud (Author), John Ashbery (Translator) 78 ratings Kindle 0.99 Read with Our Free App Paperback 15.39 43 Used from 6.60 23 New from 10.55 'This may be the most beautiful book in the world, lighted from within and somehow embodying all forms of literature. At the sheltered housing complex Lochranza Court in Saltcoats on Scotland’s coast, where Anne lives, the rules are that “any resident incapable of working a kettle would have to be moved to a nursing home.” But the onset of Anne’s dementia is different - “She appeared to be trying to climb out of herself before it was too late,” and she’s kept going by her next-door neighbor Maureen, a deliciously complex busybody who recognizes that there “was clearly a part of Anne’s life that was off limits or stuck in the past, but the dementia was bringing it out.” Luke’s Afghan mission alternates with the story of this grandmother, a once well-known photographer named Anne Quirk, who is indeed disappearing into her own experience. Even when speaking to a boy she spoke as a person not only ready to invest in you but ready to bear the costs to the end.” Anne was a woman who lived quietly and knew how to disappear into her own experience. . . Back then, Luke often walked through Kelvingrove Park in Glasgow to spend the day with his gran. Luke Campbell is a captain in the First Royal Western Fusiliers, a regiment of Irish, Scottish and English young men on a humanitarian mission, one that his commanding officer, Scullion, calls potentially “the biggest logistical task of the war.” Luke’s “a bit of a thinker,” and in the midst of the mayhem his mind drifts back to an earlier, more innocent time, feeling “the pressure of his younger self, the one. But in “The Illuminations,” the Scottish novelist and critic Andrew O’Hagan has created a story that is both a howl against the war in Afghanistan and the societies that have blindly abetted it, and a multilayered, deeply felt tale of family, loss, memory, art, loyalty, secrecy and forgiveness. When it comes to fiction, this passion can often result in rhetoric-spouting characters whose sole purpose is to service the author’s ideas. If a writer’s sentences are personal - what else, really, can they be? - and a writer has trained his lens on a bloody battleground, in reading him we will come to know where he stands, where his passions lie. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory and was also greatly inspired by the Marxism of Bertolt Brecht and Jewish mysticism as presented by Gershom Scholem.The literature of war is by its very nature political. Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) was a German-Jewish Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator, and philosopher. Leon Wieseltier’s preface explores Benjamin’s continued relevance for our times. ![]() Hannah Arendt selected the essays for this volume and introduces them with a classic essay about Benjamin’s life in a dark historical era. Illuminations also includes his penetrating study “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” an enlightening discussion of translation as a literary mode and his theses on the philosophy of history. This volume includes his views on Kafka, with whom he felt a close personal affinity his studies on Baudelaire and Proust and his essays on Leskov and Brecht’s epic theater. Walter Benjamin was an icon of criticism, renowned for his insight on art, literature, and philosophy. Essays and reflections from one of the twentieth century’s most original cultural critics, with an introduction by Hannah Arendt.
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