Tag: Tim
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The Loneliness of the Author – The Book of the New Sun
Literature is unique as an art form in that it relies entirely upon a human construct to express an idea: language. The nature of language and the challenge it presents to artistic expression are what make Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun so impressive.
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What we can learn from The Last Free Man in the midst of a pandemic
For many of us living in self-isolation, the experience has been one of incredible loneliness, which is dramatically different to the potential for isolation to be freeing and satisfying as presented by Woolston in many of his works. It seems that isolation itself does not bring freedom, but is rather a short-cut to liberation provided…
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The Light in the Eye of the Sheep
Once again, I come to you with a novel recommended to me by a dear friend. It seems to be a good way to choose literature, by having someone else determine whether it’s worth reading or not beforehand. The novel in question, The Eye of the Sheep by Sofie Laguna, was mentioned during a discussion…
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The God of Small Things
The friend who gifted me this book described it as her second or third favourite book. She had found a copy of it in one of those street libraries – the kind where you swap one book for another – and picked it up for me hoping that I would read it and write a…
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From Here To Eternity: An Intimate Death
Several weeks ago I attended a presentation that my sister had given at the National Gallery of Australia. She had participated in the ArtMed program in 2016 whilst studying medicine. For the program, she had conducted a research project into how death is presented in the artwork of the Sumatran culture and compared it to…
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J R: A Humble Cello Piece
None of William Gaddis’s books continue to be published in Australia. I had to order my copies of J R and The Recognitions from the US, ironically paying a premium for these pieces of art because, I suppose, that’s what America’s all about. It is truly tragic that Gaddis, arguably the person responsible for kickstarting…
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Siddhartha and the Quest for Subjective Experience
Recently I have found myself embroiled in the concept of subjective experience and its importance in generating true understanding about particular concepts. The human experience is a particularly challenging idea to convey to another person; it is often challenging to the point of being impossible, a limit which we can asymptotically approach but have no…
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The Outsider (The Stranger) by Albert Camus
My close friend, Arend, gave me a copy of this novella for my 20th birthday. It was the Penguin Classics translation by Sandra Smith. It’s a very short read with a succinct, dense story told from a first person perspective of a man by the name of Mersault. Every thought within the novella is as…
The Queanbeyan Review 