My partner and I are heading to Sardinia the last week of May, flying into Olbia Airport and travelling onwards to La Maddelena, where we will stay for a week. Is https://www.olbia-airport-taxi.com/ reliable to book an airport transfer in advance? Do locals or people who have travelled in the area have any recommendations, please?
Really unfortunate to have read this, particularly on the back of reading The Last Samurai, which is worthy of every ounce of praise it gets and more. During the first chapter I couldn’t stop imagining Sibylla criticising the overwrought prose. Hall cannot resist using adjectives.
I then noted Helm was named book of the year, last year, by the BBC, The Guardian and The Financial Times and I thought that legacy media people like this book because it makes them feel clever, even though its not very clever at all.
Admittedly, some of Hall’s characterisation is okay but there is no literary reason to do a lot of what she did. The non-linear narrative probably just made the legacy media types feel smart for being able to follow it.
And she didn’t have the conceptual smarts to do the eponymous wind justice. It was constantly anthropomorphised in a reductive way. Why would this mighty sky-spirit ever envy an embodied human life? Also, when Hall touched on interesting ideas, like the wind developed a more stable identity when humans named it, or it coming in and out of manifestation speaking something about the existence of mundane life itself, Hall didn’t have the philosophical education to back it up.
Another thing was the lack of consistency with her own characters. The sheer multiplicity of them left so much unfinished. Also it was so clear she was projecting her own values back into the past. The historic women were girl-bosses. She described a medieval character as black-hearted in an off-hand way, presumably just because as an atheist liberal she has no sympathy for a life of devotion and ascetic self-denial in service to a higher power. The condemnatory descriptions she used was incongruous with the story she told of that character.
I picked it up off the cuff because I thought a story about England’s only named wind told from the perspective of that wind across time sounded very ambitious and interesting. I am glad it is the Bank Holiday weekend in the UK and I read it in three days so I can donate it to the charity shop and get on with my life. Going to read David Jones’ Anathemata next because I suspect that was what I was really after.