Review 31 Reviews

It is enough!

Katharine Smyth, All The Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf

reviewed by Ben Leubner

Katharine Smyth’s memoir, All The Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf, might have been more precisely subtitled, Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, as it is by way of that novel in particular that Smyth attempts to understand certain events in her own life, especially her father’s long struggles with alcoholism and cancer, a combination that cost him his life at a young age. Smyth draws expertly from both Woolf’s life and her entire body of work... [read more]

The Socialism of Fools

Keith Kahn-Harris, Strange Hate: Antisemitism, Racism, and the Limits of Diversity

reviewed by William Eichler

On a train last summer, I made the mistake of putting David Hirsh’s Contemporary Left Antisemitism (2018) on the shared table. The elderly, white lady sat opposite, glanced at it. It’s all a ‘smear’, she said. I asked what she meant and, identifying herself as a Labour member, she delivered a medley of the greatest hits: we’re-an-anti-racist-party; I’ve never witnessed antisemitism; and anyway what about Palestine. She then shared her own version of an old classic. Growing up under... [read more]

‘The Woman’s Question . . . began in the pocket’

Barbara Burman and Ariane Fennetaux, The Pocket: A Hidden History of Women’s Lives, 1660-1900

reviewed by Anna Parker

Writing to Horace Walpole in 1737, the general and politician Henry Seymour Conway described a cross-country carriage journey that he had shared with ‘an immense, fat, brandy-faced female’. His discomfort grew when the woman started to eat, pulling her tie-on pocket out from under the folds of her dress and emptying its contents. It turned out that ‘what I took for a simple pocket [was] a cornucopia, for it disembogued itself successfully of 20 different stores of raisins, almonds,... [read more]

Digital-Libidinal Politics

JA Smith, Other People’s Politics: Populism to Corbynism

reviewed by Ed Rooksby

There is no doubt that the 2016 referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU, closely followed by the election of Donald Trump, delivered a heavy double blow to the liberal order. Leave’s victory, like Trump’s, defied all predictions and thus brought with it a sudden sense of profound disorientation. Literally overnight, as the referendum vote was counted, the liberal centre’s taken-for-granted assumptions about the fundamental solidity of the prevailing order fell apart, producing a... [read more]

What we have is a person

Lucy Ellman, Ducks, Newburyport

reviewed by Neil Griffiths

To be honest, I didn’t think I’d manage to read Ducks, Newburyport. My mental health was not good and even much shorter books defeated me. I wasn’t reading much at all really, if you discount research, which I only managed as a distraction on the tube. Depression not only takes the general joy out of life, it likes to focus on specifically joyous things as well, and a 1000-page one-sentence novel published by Galley Beggar was likely to be a joyous thing. It was around 11am on... [read more]

The Interplay of Elements

Ian Penman, It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track

reviewed by Stuart Walton

Writing about music has been the tall order and the short straw in appreciation of the arts since the advent of aesthetic theory. For elusive reasons, music signifies at deeper levels than such as can be captured linguistically, making the act of articulating its effects as fraught an enterprise as hanging ectoplasm on a washing-line. Where it speaks in its own overt languages in compositions for voices – 'Spem in alium numquam habui', 'O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!', 'E lucevan le stelle'... [read more]

Proust In the Heart of Darkness

Józef Czapski, trans. Eric Karpeles, Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp

reviewed by Mersiha Bruncevic

The painter, writer and diarist Józef Czapski (1896-1993) passed away in a small town outside Paris at the age of 96. Czapski had lived there since the end of World War II. Ailing and blind, he spent his final days listening to Chopin on an old cassette tape. The last thing he ever wrote, despite his blindness, were a few words in shaky script: ‘Bonnard, Matisse, Goya, Proust’, then, in block letters, ‘KATYN, KATYN, KATYN’. To most readers, this last word carries little meaning. To... [read more]

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]

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