Thursday, March 26, 2020

Top ten novels & stories about shame

Christos Tsiolkas is the author of six novels, including Loaded, which was made into the feature film Head-On, The Jesus Man and Dead Europe, which won the 2006 Age Fiction Prize and the 2006 Melbourne Best Writing Award, as well as being made into a feature film.

His latest novel is Damascus.

At the Guardian, Tsiolkas tagged ten novels and stories about shame, including:
The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum by Heinrich Böll

In the mid-1970s, West Germany was rocked by a series of terrorist attacks. Böll uses that backdrop to examine what happens to a woman who is inadvertently caught up in the ruthlessness and paranoia of the state. Katharina Blum is at first pursued by government agents and then by the media, who relish destroying the sexual and moral reputation of an innocent woman. This novel is a powerful and compassionate howl against the tyranny of those who confuse morality with politics, all those ideologues, of the left as much as the right, who believe that the end justifies the means.
Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue