Marabou Stork Nightmares His life in this state is a miserable affair, surrounded by uncaring doctors and his extremely dysfunctional family. In his fantasy life, he is an adventurer in the wilds of South Africa, where he and his loyal guide, Sandy Jamieson, hunt for the marabou stork. When not hallucinating, Strang tells his life story, beginning in a "scheme" (local authority housing) in Muirhouse, Scotland, with his violent, delusional parents, two half-brothers (one a womanizer, the other flamboyantly gay), and his promiscuous sister, all of whom he despises. The family relocates to apartheid-era South Africa when he is an adolescent, where he
What is a Masterpiece? confluence of memories and emotions forming a single idea", that it has "a power of recreating traditional forms so that they become expressive of an artist's own epoch and yet keep a relationship to the past". The highest masterpieces are said to be "illustrations of great themes." Clark also implicitly excluded the erotic from considerations of what constituted a masterpiece, based on his perspective that a necessary condition is the balance between sense and form (works that are too sensual are, therefore, unbalanced and not to be categorised at masterpiece level). What is a Masterpiece? What is a Masterpiece? is