{New season collection by Juliette Hogan}

Some lovely ensembles from Zara

Also, in exciting news, Zara will be opening their online store on 2nd September. Bring it on!

Apart from knowing that ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’ had originally been penned by Fitzgerald before being made into a multi million dollar movie, I had heard little about the existence of these short stories. Indeed the short story was something that I had rarely come across since the fairy tales I was read as a child.

Yet, far from the fairy tales of childhood, these stories are the fairy tales of the Jazz Age and the time that followed it; they are darker, filled with intense glamour, but cloaked in a great shadow. It is the stuff of a beautiful yet terrible dream. Even our characters, when looking back on this era of opulence, cannot be quite sure that it happened. We are witness to a form of black magic, but also an underlying reality that communicates universal themes such as the inevitable fading of beauty and the passing of time.

Fitzgerald captures the absurdity of wealth and its irony in stories such as ‘The Diamond as Big as the Ritz’, hope, illusions, frustration and disenchantment haunt these pages. It is ‘all very rich and very sad’. Nonetheless,  a wittiness pervades his narrative, and the tales documenting the unfortunate progress of Pat Hobby are incredibly amusing. In ‘Babylon Revisited’, a story of fatherhood, we find a great tenderness that appears to come from the heart of the writer himself. And in the last lines of the collection, amidst the final story ‘The Lost Decade’, there lies the possibility of regeneration.

Though his short stories lack the great sorrowing tragedy that lingers throughout many of his novels, we glimpse brief moments of such intensity, that leave the reader suddenly aching at both the beauty of the language and the emotional force of Fitzgerald’s writing. For although we continually witness enchantment followed by crushing disillusionment, we continue to read on, turning one page and then the next. For those who know and love Fitzgerald as a writer, these stories are further confirmation of his ability to enchant and compel with words and tales, but they also stand as a wonderful collection of stories in their own right; beautiful snippets of an age we all secretly wish we could have been part of.

The Mulberry Alexa Bag

{storage inspiration: pretty jewelry display}

{storage inspiration: pretty jewelry display}

pretty good....

Preen Resort Collection 2011
Effortless Style

Love, love, love these.... Beautiful cloth bound editions of Penguin Classics, illustrated by Coralie Bickford-Smith... All I need now is a rich suitor to buy them for me...

{images from French Vogue}

"To hide in the magnificent folds of eloquence the barren darkness of his heart...."

Conrad’s Heart of Darkness speaks of Marlow’s journeys deep into the heart of the Congo in search of the mysterious Kurtz. Not only does his novel speak of the horrors of the colonial rule in the Belgian Congo and its futile intent, but in a more symbolic way of the human condition. Held in perfect equipoise between realism and modernism, Conrad explores consciousness in a manner which, if not entirely comfortable, is nonetheless fascinating. Infused with the echoes of both the gothic and the detective genre this book appeals to a variety of literary tastes.

I was captivated by the abundance of imagery and symbolism that haunt the pages of this dark novel. I found myself driven further on with an urgency similar to that of Marlow’s, both to discover and understand Kurtz. Deep and complex questions are raised and for a relatively small volume their significance is vast. Long after the last page has been turned these questions continued to linger at the periphery of our conscience.

Heart of Darkness is a classic that is not only a pleasure to read, but causes us to examine in new light the nature of our being.
{my review of Heart of Darkness, published on the Penguin Student Review Website}

Books to Read...

 

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet - David Mitchell 

 David Mitchell's book Cloud Atlas amazed me with the vast realms of past, present and future that he managed to skilfully and seamlessly weave. His new novel is set to be just as incredible..

The Postmistress - Sarah Blake

"a sweeping, romantic and harrowing tale of three unforgettable women, war torn fates and of what happens when those we love leave us behind"

what more could you want... 

The Beautiful and the Damned - F. Scott Fitzgerald 

F. Scott Fitzgerald book are filled with whispers of age that was both beautiful and tragic - his stories, both spellbinding and sorrowful. I have been meaning to read this book for a while now...