About the blog
The Brooknerian is a personal blog, a digital archive and a literary journal celebrating the life and work of Dr Anita Brookner (1928-2016), Booker Prize-winning novelist and renowned art historian.
The Booker win notwithstanding, Brookner was often miscategorised during her lifetime, dismissed as small, genteel: 'the dead end of English literature', as one critic put it.
More perceptive readers, then and now, identify in Brookner a unique voice and a sensibility extending far beyond the time and place the writer inhabited.
Particularly prized is the dark glamour of her mandarin prose, unlike anything else in contemporary fiction.
The Brooknerian is curated space for:
- accessible literary analysis of Brookner’s two-dozen novels;
- examination of Brookner’s work in art criticism and history;
- consideration of the ‘Brookner aesthetic’, the guidance implicit in her work on how to live a Brooknerian life; and
- discussion of ‘Brookner intertexts’, from Henry James to Stendhal.
Over a number of years, the blog has proved a resource to thousands of readers - from Brookner newbies to students reading the author as part of their studies.
About me
I'm an Englishman living in Dorset and London with a lifelong interest in Dr Brookner's work. It stems from a random encounter with Hotel du Lac in a public library at the age of eighteen and a not-so-random meeting with the author herself in a London street a few years later. The glitter of her prose, the radical nature of her themes, and the depth of her erudition continue to dazzle and console me nearly forty years later.
But art, as she said, doesn't love you and will not console you...
I use the nom de plume Tom Sabine, and my profile picture, by Géricault, first seen on the cover of Brookner's essay collection Soundings, is to be seen in the flesh in a highly Brooknerian museum in Ghent.
Contact me
I love hearing from fellow readers and
researchers. If you have a comment or question, please contact me via one of the
following methods:
- through the Contact Us section on the blog;
- by leaving a comment under one of the posts; or
- by emailing brooknerian@gmail.com
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Questions and comments are always welcome. (Please note: there will be a short delay before publication, as comments are moderated.) Alternatively, to message directly, please email brooknerian@gmail.com