Serious effort is being made on both sides of the Atlantic to promote Coll not merely as an ‘unjustly neglected author’, or an ‘eccentric, hermetic writer’ — the stock role of the rediscovered 20th-century genius — but as the very paradigm of belatedness itself, of isolation itself: the writer with an audience of one. If this critical-marketing strategy draws more readers to Coll’s extraordinary novel, I’m all for it. But I also want to suggest that it runs the risk of obscuring another, potentially more interesting way of understanding his project. While Coll certainly makes use of the past, there is an element, or better yet a vector, of his discourse that is always projected towards the future, towards the question of literary futurity. [read full essay]
On October 9, 2024, a year after Hamas’ brutal attack on Israel, the New York Times published accounts of what 65 American doctors, nurses, and paramedics saw while working in Gaza’s hospitals during the following year of siege, slaughter, and famine. One type of medical issue that repeatedly occurred was children with gunshots to the head or left side of the chest. ‘I couldn’t believe the number of kids I saw shot in the head,’ Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, the article’s author — who worked at a hospital in Khan Younis for two weeks — told another doctor who had also worked there, after returning home. ‘Yeah, me too,’ that doctor responded. ‘Every day.’ [read full essay]
Vauhini Vara, Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age
reviewed by Helena C. Aeberli
At first glance, the cover of Vauhini Vara’s Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age — a still life from the Dutch Golden Age set on a neutral backdrop, surrounded by critical analysis — bears a striking resemblance to John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. It took me half the book to realise what the cover art was actually mimicking: the interface of ChatGPT, OpenAI’s generative AI chatbot, the subject of Vara’s work and, in some senses, her co-author.
In Ways of Seeing, Berger wrote of... [read more]
Back in the 60s and 70s, the male novel was cool: male writers, on male things, for a male audience. But by 1991 Britain’s laureate of masculinity, Martin Amis, was lamenting in the London Review of Books that ‘maleness itself has become an embarrassment. Male consciousness, male pride, male rage — we don’t want to hear about it.’ That remained speciously true until this latest so-called crisis of masculinity, when a few quixotic hacks determined that what young men really need is the... [read more]
Josh Cohen, All the Rage: Why Anger Drives the World
reviewed by Tymek Woodham
The way we experience anger today is no more evident than in the trenches of our hypermediated lives. On a train, a sign placidly informs me that verbally abusing staff members is inappropriate in civil society, and that I can report any transgression to the company using a QR code. On my smartphone, I flick to a news app where a politician is brought to tears by the online harassment they’ve received ‘simply’ for quibbling over potential misapplications of the word ‘genocide’. On an... [read more]
Peter Ackroyd, The English Soul: Faith of a Nation
reviewed by Archie Cornish
The Anglo-Saxon kings encountered Christianity at the turn of the seventh century. Over the following hundred years their kingdoms gradually ‘christianised’, and that process was linked to the coalescence of separate realms into a single nation. In the celebrated spoof history textbook 1066 And All That (1930), W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman condense these huge parallel shifts into a single, crisp sentence: ‘the country was now almost entirely inhabited by Saxons and was therefore renamed... [read more]
Ryan Ruby, Context Collapse: A Poem Containing a History of Poetry
reviewed by Joshua Abbey
Critic Ryan Ruby has written a poem for poet-scholars, which is fitting. About 150 pages into Context Collapse: A Poem Containing a History of Poetry, he argues that most contemporary poetry is written by poets at universities for poets at universities. His story of poetry begins in the oral age of Homer and Hesiod when there was no distinction between poet and audience. As singer and sung-to are ‘cosensible’, there can be no questions of authorship, intention, or interpretation — the... [read more]
One of Alan Hollinghurst's favoured novelistic techniques is the casual introduction among his fictional dramatis personae of people from outside the realms of invention. Still the most daring incidence of this is the extended scene in The Line of Beauty (2004), set in the 1980s, in which the then prime minister Margaret Thatcher makes an appearance, taking a stately turn around the dancefloor with its central character, Nick Guest. It is a moment both chilling in its monstrosity, and studiedly... [read more]
Claudia Piñeiro, trans. Frances Riddle, Time of the Flies
reviewed by Bronwyn Scott-McCharen
If, in the 20th century, Argentina was primarily known for its tumultuous and oftentimes violent political landscape, one of frequent military coups and the transformation of disappeared into both a noun and a (newly transitive) verb, then in the 21st it is perhaps more positively regarded for its early and enormous strides made in gender equality and LGBTQ rights. Argentina was the first country in Latin America to legalise same-sex marriage in 2010, as well as a worldwide pioneer in... [read more]
We all hate meta-poems at this point, right? Or do we?
Poetry about poetry has long been a product of the workshop–industrial complex, and the out-of-touch-ness of so much of it has engendered a backlash from readers, even those readers who themselves emerged from writing programmes. Looking in the mirror is fun until it’s not. Seeing too much of oneself can ultimately be weird and alienating, the way saying a word over and over and over makes it start to sound like gibberish.
It’s... [read more]
Munir Hachemi, trans. Julia Sanchez, Living Things
reviewed by Peter Adkins
Meat eaters are bad readers. Or so the protagonist of Munir Hachemi’s debut novel, Living Things, comes to believe when, after a night working on an industrial chicken farm, he realises that his understanding of animal agriculture has rested on a false consciousness. The cheap cuts of meat that he had previously happily subsisted upon are in fact documents of barbarism and horror. In a novel preoccupied with the capacities of literature to confront the ruthlessness of the contemporary world... [read more]
Kohei Saito, trans. Brian Bergstrom, Slow Down: How Degrowth Communism Can Save the Earth
reviewed by Sam Gregory
In his 2006 film about Stalinism, Joebuilding, Jonathan Meades explains how the Soviet Union set out to bend the environment, as it did people, to its will. ‘[Stalin] was a greater force than nature, he created inland seas, his slave labourers died in their thousands digging bloated canals more ostentatious than utility demanded. . . their function was to prove the state’s might. Like many autocrats before him, Stalin determined to control the climate. Unlike them, he partially... [read more]
