Review 31 Reviews

Musical Chairs

Hugo Williams, Lines Off

reviewed by GE Stevens

There’s an element of musical chairs to Lines Off, HugoWilliams’ first collection since I Knew the Bride in 2014. Whilst the music plays, Williams remembers the ‘faded photo strips’ of his past with characteristic swagger and self-effacing humour. He takes us back to his school coming out ball, ‘We were drinking and driving, barely surviving’; he takes us to Paris to fall for Tara Browne who ‘went out into the night, / dancing your crazy doodle-step/on the pedals of your Lotus... [read more]

Looking at Life from the Inside

Clare Carlisle, Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard

reviewed by Ruby Guyatt

‘Joy is the present tense, with the whole emphasis upon the present.’ Clare Carlisle may not quote these words, written by Søren Kierkegaard in 1848, but her lyrical biography of the Danish philosopher-poet nevertheless performs them. Unlike much writing about philosophy, Carlisle’s prose is imaginative and lucid; unlike most biographies, much of Philosopher of the Heart is written in the present tense, inviting the reader to accompany Kierkegaard as he walks Copenhagen’s cobbled... [read more]

A Curious Pleasure

Neil Griffiths, As a God Might Be

reviewed by Andre van Loon

As a God Might Be is a wonderful and weird novel that takes you further and deeper than many others – while yet leaving a sense of emotional frustration by its final, 599th page. To put my cards on the table immediately: I couldn’t stop reading the book, but also closed it repeatedly with a sense of impatience. It’s a curious thing to wolf down a novel that you also think dodges valuable questions – there is an undoubted skill in that. I cannot but recommend you read it for... [read more]

Inexpressible Wounds

Sinéad Gleeson, Constellations: Reflections from Life

reviewed by Liam Harrison

Sinéad Gleeson’s Constellations opens with a series of epigraphs. One of them is from Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts: ‘Empirically speaking, we are made of star stuff. Why aren’t we talking more about that?’ Constellations is in dialogue with an array of literary reference points, but particularly with Nelson’s argonaut analogy, which presents the body not as something static, but as a series of makings and un-makings. Gleeson explores this star stuff, the matter that makes us –... [read more]

'They All Hate Us'

Daniel Trilling, Lights in the Distance: Exile and Refuge at the Borders of Europe

reviewed by Daniel Whittall

It has become all too easy in the last couple of years, as media coverage of refugees, asylum seekers and other migrants arriving in Europe has waned, to look disparagingly and somewhat smugly across the Atlantic at Donald Trump’s blunt approach to border politics. Overt calls for the building of a wall (or, more accurately, the completion of an already partially-constructed fence), coupled with footage of children separated from their parents and kept in cages, have allowed citizens in... [read more]

A Hidden King, a Talking Dog, and a City Overrun with Prophets

Dror Burstein, trans. Gabriel Levine, Muck

reviewed by Steve Rineer

Dror Burstein’s novel Muck, translated into English by Gabriel Levine, is a re-envisioning of the biblical Book of Jeremiah filled with a strange and beautiful originality. Burstein draws a parallel between ancient and modern times, but through a ridiculous, slightly futuristic, and dystopian reconfiguration of present-day reality. Muck, like our world, has a Guinness Book of World Records, with one character hoping to enter its pantheon by filling a stadium with largest bowl of hummus in... [read more]

A Captivity That is Both Delightful and Decisive

Olivia Rosenthal, trans. Sophie Lewis, To Leave with the Reindeer

reviewed by Tony Messenger

In the era of instant social media attention, activism has reached new levels of prominence, with animal activism in particular finding increasing acceptance among the broader public. Groups such as PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), with over 6.5 million members worldwide, use shock tactics to garner support and further debate. But animal activism has yet to appear as an overarching theme in mainstream literature. Enter Olivia Rosenthal’s first novel to appear in... [read more]

Santa Ana Noir

Laila Lalami, The Other Americans

reviewed by Stephanie Sy-Quia

It is Joan Didion who writes that driving offers ‘a seductive unconnectedness,’ and Tara Jepsen who claims ‘Driving emphasizes that America is full of people with no sense of civic responsibility.’ Cars are certainly an apt metaphor for the self-interested incarnation of the American Dream which has dominated the public discourse of the United States since the post-war period: individualised, private, separate means of arrival, passing out of the picture and into the sunset – a lone... [read more]

Culturally and Somatically Multiple

Yara Rodrigues Fowler, Stubborn Archivist

reviewed by Will Forrester

In a recent interview with Northern Review, the poet Sophie Collins discussed women writers being compared in reviews to their characters: ‘Writers of course write about events that they have experienced, in one way or another, but the very fact of putting those experiences into literary prose immediately converts them into fiction. This is something I really believe but see everywhere challenged.’ She also talked about literary representations of trauma: ‘Naming oneself and... [read more]

To Record and Be Recorded

Ruby Cowling, This Paradise

reviewed by Jon Doyle

A dinner party. Sarah is an artist going through an obsessive if unprofitable fixation on the larval and pupal stages of moths. Ray is a fellow guest invited by optimistic match-making friends. Satisfied with her self-imposed middle-aged solitude, Sarah is mildly alarmed by the situation, though finds Ray genuinely curious about her work. More surprisingly, she finds herself interested in his computing job, where he works on something termed persistence. ‘A quality your data gains when you... [read more]

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