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]
In his 2005 review of Reading Lolita in Tehran, Christopher Hitchens refers to what he considers the ‘Amis test’ regarding Nabokov’s original: basically, who spots or misses the very early (pre-H.H.) reference to Mrs ‘Richard F. Schiller’ (‘dead on arrival’, as Amis had it). Tucked up in a fictional foreword, the detail is given ‘For the benefit of old-fashioned readers who wish to follow the destinies of the “real” people beyond the “true” story.’
I’m pretty sure... [read more]
‘Ghost Mountain was Ghost Mountain’. This is the refrain throughout Rónán Hession’s mesmerising third novel. It is about a mountain that suddenly appears. It is about the meaning and intentions people attribute to the mountain. It is about Ghost Mountain’s lack of meaning and intention. Ghost Mountain is like a stone dropped into a pond. Hession fills his book with the ripples.
Ghost Mountain arrives quietly, misting into view:
It was, in the ordinary sense of the word, a... [read more]
To read The Coiled Serpent is to live out an indignant maid’s wildest revenge fantasy without getting sticky fingers. A can of horse glue, one of Grudova’s recurring objects, might feature alongside tiny scissors and a voodoo doll on the worktop of someone harbouring particularly bitter feelings towards an alpha ex-boyfriend. In such a case, reading this tantalising collection of stories is a much neater coping strategy.
The collection ranges widely. There’s the gothic tale,... [read more]
Becca Rothfeld, All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess
reviewed by Grace Tomlinson
A chapter in US critic Becca Rothfeld’s astonishing debut essay collection, All Things Are Too Small, opens with professional minimalist Marie Kondo ripping out what she wants to keep from her books and disposing of the rest. Her newly freed pages are printed with sentences that inspire her, and are therefore allowed their paper-thin allotment in Kondo’s carefully decluttered home.
The more extreme minimalist can save yet more space, if only in one dimension, by cutting out these... [read more]
In the 1890s, with the rise of electric lighting and the need for copper wiring, the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, headquartered in Butte, Montana, and owned by Irishman Marcus Daly, became one of the largest mining operations in the entire world. Buttressed by an enormous vein of copper, Butte was a boomtown, and the resulting labor opportunities — potentially lucrative but extremely dangerous — attracted an influx of Irish immigrants. By the turn of the century, over a quarter of its... [read more]
