Day for Night
A Novel

I will start with the positives. The basic set up of the novel is an indie film director Richard and his producer wife Joanna, set out in 2018 (based on Richard’s idea) to make a film about the German Jewish philosopher, critic and essayist Walter Benjamin. Richard casts in the role of Benjamin an a......more

Richard is a screenwriter and director of art house films. Joanna is a film producer. Married, with two near-adult children, living in London comfortably but by no means wealthy, the reader through them examines the complex elements that comprise one’s identity at middle age. And not just any middle......more

wow this was good john schad you will adore this book the focus on walter benjamin’s life through film was so interesting and the comparisons of his experiences with those of the modern way were not anything i’d thought about before so slay also love a good queer storyline also some GORGEOUS use of the......more

Books with very little plot are often completely saved by the rich emotional lives of their characters, but this is not one of them. The characters are self indulgent, obsessed with authenticity to the point of not being real, and overcome by a victim complex re: Brexit that I found insufferable. A......more

(3.5 rounded to 4.0) During the last years of BREXIT negotiations and the early days of COVID, this novel was published (~2018). The novel uses the contemporary current events as a means of comparing itself to Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando”. The issues used to examine are the writings of a German Jewish......more