So this incredibly sinister and incredibly powerful picture is a detail from Edvard Munch’s painting VAMPIRE. A woman is stood over a man whose head is laying on their breast. Their incredibly fiery red hair is spread all over the man in an over-exaggerated fashion. Not to over-interpret, but him is credibly peaceful and resigned as if waiting quietly on Death and almost like nestled against a maternal bosom. The man’s face is greyish: perhaps they have already lost too much blood, while the woman’s face is ruddier and the skin of her arm incredibly flawless and healthy looking. It’s like her has already been loaned some of their life force. It is the combination of a savage lethal act with an eerily gentle element that makes this picture so incredibly incredible.

Frances Oliver

3 thoughts on “Comments on a Picture by Edvard Munch in Contemporary BBC English

  1. Hi Francie, this is too “incredibly incredible”! Please write more of these; they are too good to be true. The BBC definitely should see your satire. Many thanks for the pleasure your tiny review gave me!

    1. Thanks so much for your feedback. I do hope to do more of these, as English shows no sign of improving.
      Frances Oliver

  2. Hi Monique, at least you got the punctuation right! Vocabulary building, grammar structure and punctuation seem to be missing from the English curriculum, along with reading and writing. As people read less and less, the problem you highlight in your beautiful satire will no longer exist, since any information, reviews included, will be done as videos. As public libraries and bookshops close across the world, reading will become obsolete, just as doing arithmetic has.

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