Dan Lyons, Lab Rats: How Modern Work Makes People Miserable
reviewed by Samuel Gregory
The 'always on' office culture enabled by smartphones and laptops is coming under increasing scrutiny. A steady stream of books and papers have nudged anti-work ideas into the mainstream in recent years, notably David Graeber’s irreverent 2013 essay ‘On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs’, David Frayne’s 2015 book The Refusal of Work and most successfully, Rutger Bregman’s 2016 bestseller Utopia for Realists. Joining them is Lab Rats by US tech writer Dan Lyons, who wrote about his time... [read more]
TJ Clark, Heaven On Earth: Painting and the Life to Come
reviewed by Dan Barrow
In Giotto's Joachim's Dream (1304-6), one of a sequence of fresco panels in Padua's Capella Scrovegni, a mountain's profile marks the boundary between earth and sky, at once contiguous and rigidly opposed. The angel descending from top-left marks the sky out as the realm of the divine, its blue ‘as cold as a colour can be, pressing down into the desert at the angel's behest’, and seeming almost to pop out of the picture plane. In the first and most persuasive of the five essays that make up... [read more]
In ‘Betraying Appearances’ (1997), WA Cohen’s excellent review of Mary Ann O’Farrell’s Telling Complexions: The Nineteenth-Century English Novel and the Blush (1997), Cohen leans on O’Farrell’s attentiveness to the relationships between the somatic and the semantic to belabour a point. He talks about words in English whose meanings contradict, suggesting the most ‘beguiling’ of these is the verb belie: ‘To belie is to expose a falsehood; it is also, however, to disguise... [read more]
Nobody could accuse Franco Berardi of underestimating the scale of the problem facing an oppositional politics today. In Thomas Hobbes's mid-17th century, there was a civil polity to which all might be assumed to have sworn allegiance, conceding its right to intervene in the lives of its clients in return for protecting them from a delimited range of private enormities, while expecting them to pre-authorise its own enormous intrusions into intellectual and social liberty, as the guaranteed... [read more]
Édouard Louis, trans. Lorin Stein, Who Killed My Father
reviewed by Adam Scovell
Édouard Louis’s third book, Who Killed My Father (Qui a tué mon père), begins by setting out the blueprint for another form. ‘If this were a text for the theatre,’ he writes, ‘here is how it would begin. . .’ Ever since Louis’s debut novel The End of Eddy (En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule, 2014),the writer has pushed against the limitations of his medium, in particular its reach and its potential to instigate change. He has since jumped between forms, his work being heavily... [read more]
In April 1971, the weekly Parisian news magazine Le Nouvel Observateur published a letter submitted by 343 women. In a few brief paragraphs, the letter declared that the undersigned women – including, among many others, the likes of Simone de Beauvoir, Catherine Deneuve, Françoise Sagan, and Agnès Varda – had all undergone illegal abortions. The letter attempted to remove the shroud of secrecy surrounding abortion and champion its legalisation; it undoubtedly contributed to the eventual... [read more]
In the 1950s and even as late as the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was common for American Jews to be reluctant to say where their families came from. To be asked about ancestral background could be inferred as suggesting that you were somehow ‘unAmerican’, to use the ugly McCarthy era term. If now ensconced in bourgeois comfort, many immigrant Jews had indeed been Marxists in youth. Names had been clipped or otherwise altered – Krumkotkin to Krumm as for the grandfather of the protagonist... [read more]
Who Is Mary Sue? is a collection that views itself but refuses to comment. It ranges over forms of poetry, essay, confessional writing, witness statement. (It is even part-review itself, for example in ‘a whistle in the gloom’, which considers Pauline Réage’s The Story of O.) Specifically, as in this example from ‘As bread is the body of Christ, so is glass the very flesh of the Devil’, it is aware of the way in which readers view both a text written by a woman and the female writer:... [read more]
Curzio Malaparte, trans. Jenny McPhee, The Kremlin Ball
reviewed by Marcel Inhoff
The Kremlin Ball is an extraordinary book – flawed, incomplete, mad. As literature it is nowhere near Malaparte’s best, and yet its inadequacies make it the pleasurable rarity that it is. It is an unfinished novel, found among the writer’s papers after his death. Composed in large part between his two better-known masterpieces, Kaputt (1944) and The Skin (1949), it breaks new ground for the novelist and scandal-monger. Rather than describe – as the other two books did, often in... [read more]
By all accounts, the city of Rome should have passed into the footnotes of history long ago, a sad victim of multiple sackings, internecine division, depopulation and egregious neglect. Case in point: in the early fifth century, a roaming military force of Visigoths crept uncomfortably far into Italy, bypassing the new capital Ravenna, and encircling Rome. Negotiations faltered, and in 410 CE the city was systematically, scrupulously levelled. The sacking was, by the standards of its age,... [read more]
