Review 31 Reviews

Comfort and Convenience

Hilary Macaskill, Virginia Woolf at Home

reviewed by Karina Jakubowicz

When Virginia Woolf visited the home of the celebrated author, Thomas Carlyle, she mused on how writers appear to imprint themselves onto their surroundings. ‘It would seem,’ she considered, ‘that writers stamp themselves upon their possessions more indelibly than other people,’ having ‘a faculty for housing themselves appropriately, for making the table, the chair, the curtain, the carpet into their own image.’ Carlyle had been dead for several years when Woolf first visited his... [read more]

In-Utero Advantage Maximisation

Joanne Ramos, The Farm

reviewed by Stephanie Sy-Quia

These truths we hold to be self-evident: - Motherhood is work. - Motherhood is unpaid work. - Motherhood is unpaid work which comes at the expense of paid work. - Motherhood is unpaid work which, because it comes at the expense of paid work, is often subcontracted to other women, who are paid. Often, in the words of Megan Stack, ‘They [are] poor women, brown women, migrant women.’ And, she writes, ‘They were important to me, primarily, because they made me free.’ Stack is writing... [read more]

Ripple Effects

Henrik Nor-Hansen, trans. Matt Bagguley, Termin

reviewed by Megan Evershed

To me, there are two Norways. There is the peaceful, idyllic Norway that was voted the world’s Happiest Country in 2017. And then there is the darker Norway: the Norway of Scandi noir, the Norway that has known mass-scale violence like the July 2011 terror attacks. Henrik Nor-Hansen’s Termin, translated by Matt Bagguley, is definitely set in this second Norway. Nor-Hansen is concerned thematically with violence, disillusionment, and suburban socioeconomic changes. In particular, he’s... [read more]

World-making

Rachael Allen, Kingdomland

reviewed by Bethan James

‘Watch the forest burn/ with granular heat’, comes the opening instruction of Kingdomland. This is appropriate to a collection that abounds with stark, singular imagery and sets the tone for a poetry that is as graphic as it is immersive: ‘Watch,’ says Rachael Allen, commanding our attention. Allen’s practice is of world-making, a Kingdomland whose underlying cohesion is disguised to the inattentive reader, appearing at first disorienting and chaotic, disjunctured, often appalling;... [read more]

So, are you in or are you out?

Karen Solie, The Caiplie Caves

reviewed by GE Stevens

Toronto-based writer Karen Solie, described by Michael Hofmann as ‘the one by whom the language lives’, has done it again. The Caiplie Caves is both an extraordinary and unsettling accomplishment. Solie begins by setting out a brief history of the caves and a description of the book’s protagonist of indecision, St Ethernan. Whilst the caves are still visited today, she tells us, records of St Ethernan are ‘often sketched only briefly, in passing’ so that his story ‘resists a final... [read more]

Passive Infinitive

Nicole Flattery, Show Them a Good Time

reviewed by Magdalena Miecznicka

Even if the details of their adventures vary throughout the eight short stories comprising Nicole Flattery's debut collection, Show Them a Good Time, her protagonists bear a striking resemblance to one another. Not only are they (with one exception) relatively young women from small-town backgrounds – Flattery is 29 and from Kinnegad, Co Westmeath in Ireland – they also share a propensity to float through life like sticks thrown into a stream, barely resisting the things that happen to... [read more]

The Revolution Will Be Digitised

Donatella Della Ratta, Shooting a Revolution: Visual Media and Warfare in Syria

reviewed by Giovanni Vimercati

Unlike many accounts of what Western commentators referred to as the ‘Arab Springs’ and the creative insurgency that chronicled and simultaneously fuelled them, Shooting a Revolution: Visual Media and Warfare in Syria refrains from the acritical celebration of the alleged power of social media to undermine authoritarian regimes. Rather than simply a skeptical dismissal of the role grassroots media played in the Syrian uprising, Donatella Della Ratta has produced an in-depth study of its... [read more]

A New and Better Daddy

Katherine Angel, Daddy Issues

reviewed by Laura Hackett

‘There is no democracy in any love relation: only mercy,’ wrote Gillian Rose in Love’s Work. There is no justice to be found; no rulebook with consequences for illicit behaviour. This is a terrifying truth even when relationships take place on a level playing field – you cannot sue a friend for betraying you – but when combined with structural inequalities of race, class and gender, it is deeply, unfathomably unfair. It is not fair, for example, that Asian men and black women receive... [read more]

Was It Ever Harder to Believe in Our World?

Sam Lipsyte, Hark

reviewed by Jon Doyle

‘Listen, before Hark,’ opens Sam Lipsyte’s latest novel, ‘was it ever harder to be human? Was it ever harder to believe in our world?’ Whether the question refers to the novel or its titular character, the answer appears to be a resounding no. Ravaged by exploitative capitalism and climate breakdown, Lipsyte’s world is our own as caught in funhouse mirrors, stretched and heightened into forms both hilarious and terrible. America is at war with Europe, fighting for control of... [read more]

A Deeper Vein of Truth

Fredric Jameson, Allegory and Ideology

reviewed by Stuart Walton

The allegorical tradition in literary history has been an inexhaustibly rich source of speculation through the ages, and over the past century in particular. This is owing, at least in part, to the indeterminate status of allegory itself. Is it a genre in its own right? Is it a technique? Is it a literary temperament inherited from the performing arts, such as antique theatre and the medieval play of lamentation (Trauerspiel) of which Walter Benjamin wrote, or even from theology? How do its... [read more]

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