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Jump to navigationJump to searchTen Days in the Hills by Jane Smiley (view source)
Revision as of 09:42, 14 May 2018
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Fifteen years ago Jane Smiley wrote a Pulitzer prize-winning novel, [[''A Thousand Acres]]'', inspired by Shakespeare's "King Lear". This book takes the same approach of pinching inspiration from elsewhere, but not from where you might immediately think. Ian McEwan's 2005 novel [[Saturday]] covers the same theme as ''Ten Days In The Hills''(the Iraq war) and manages to do so within the course of a single day, 15 Feb 2003, when the big anti-war demonstration was held in London. Smiley, however, is American, so her version is bigger though not neccesarily better. Her 464 pages cover a longer period - those 10 days
mentioned in the title in fact - at the start of the Iraq war at the end of March 2003. This time, her literary inspiration is Giovanni Boccaccio's classic [[The Decameron]], where 7 rich young ladies plus 3 young noblemen, linked by family and/or friendship, retreat to their country properties in the hills around Florence to escape the Black Death which has grabbed hold of practically everyone they know. Here they pass the time over 10 days, each telling a story a day.
