Marie NDiaye, trans. Jordan Stump, Self-Portrait in Green
reviewed by Lydia Bunt
There’s not much variation in day-to-day life at the moment. Time seems to repeat, without progressing forward. One small pleasure is that I have donned my favourite green trousers to write this review. But this is not enough to make me ‘green’ in the eyes of Marie NDiaye. Greenness is not identifiable merely by apparel, but rather hovers over a person as a greenish tinge, an aura. The colour, conventionally conjoined with envy, connotes a further ‘cruelty’ in this intriguing piece of... [read more]
Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said
reviewed by Raphael Cormack
The Edward W. Said Reading Room is at the end of a long corridor, on the sixth floor of Columbia University’s main library. It holds what remains of Edward Said’s personal library and, as such, is a physical manifestation of his intellectual life. On the left as you walk in, there are shelves of books on music; you then move past Arabic literature, European and American literature, past a whole wall of Middle Eastern history and politics and then return to music, where you started. If you... [read more]
Bradley Garrett, Bunker: Building for the End Times
reviewed by Calum Barnes
It wasn’t until we crested the hill that we first caught sight of the angular concrete protuberances perched atop the farmer’s field. After a tense standoff with a territorial cow and her young calf, my friend and I cautiously approached the largest of them. The rusted metal lid did not resist our tugs and balanced open on its trestle joint hinge to reveal a mounted steel ladder descending into darkness. At the bottom, my phone torch shone a light on what resembled a rudimentary office.... [read more]
Alice Kelly, Commemorative Modernisms: Women Writers, Death and the First World War
reviewed by Lizzie Hibbert
The death of somebody you love changes everything. In her meditation on the unexpected death of her son, Time Lived, Without Its Flow (2012), Denise Riley writes that in the moments after the news of a loss, ‘[n]othing has changed, and yet it all has.’ You hang up the phone call that broke the bad news to find that the room has shifted around you somehow; you step outside the hospital, after saying goodbye, into air that smells strange and new. The next morning, when you wake up, the sun... [read more]
When the presiding critic of English letters, James Wood, is particularly exercised by a novel, he writes a parody. Most memorably, Zadie Smith in 2000 and Paul Auster in 2009 received this treatment, a ruthless paragraph lampooning the former’s ‘hysterical realism’ and the latter’s metafictional banality. Upon finishing Fake Accounts, I wondered if Lauren Oyler had attempted something similar at book length. Though not yet any challenger to Wood, Oyler is certainly cooler than him, at... [read more]
Mathilda has been escaping for a long time. Slipping between aliases, from home to home, away from patronising friends she resents but depends on for favours, she is a daring chancer and a mistress of reinvention. She has worked out early and decisively that ‘miserly as they are, rich people will happily prop up their own kind for years. If they, however, discover they are suspending someone not of their own kind, unwittingly dangling them by a thread, they will start to feel charitable,... [read more]
Souvankham Thammavongsa’s debut short story collection, How to Pronounce Knife, is every bit as poetic, heart-wrenching and poignant as its title suggests. Utterly original and rich in emotion, these stories follow the lives of Laotian immigrants who, severed from their past, seek happiness, love and a sense of belonging.
The title story, ‘How to Pronounce Knife,’ is the perfect introduction to this series of poignant explorations of hope, resilience and coming to terms with somewhere... [read more]
‘Now feebly commence a sentence,’ with a lark or a plunge, with a little doff of the syntactical hat to Donald Barthelme, whose single-sentence seven-page story ‘Sentence’ begins ‘Or a long sentence moving at a certain pace down the page aiming for the bottom — if not the bottom of this page then of some other page — where it can rest, or stop for a moment to think about the questions raised by its own (temporary) existence,’ the opening sentence of Brian Dillon’s Suppose a... [read more]
According to the philosopher Theodor Adorno, the ‘maturity’ of the late works of important artists ‘is not like the ripeness of fruit’. Late works, he says, ‘are not well rounded, but wrinkled, even fissured. They are apt to lack sweetness, fending off with prickly tartness those interested merely in sampling them.’
Few would likely recommend The Silence, Don DeLillo’s 18th novel and his prickliest yet, to a reader interested in sampling his work. The Silence is awkward, full... [read more]
Aaron Tugendhaft, The Idols of ISIS: From Assyria to the Internet
reviewed by Farah Abdessamad
There’s an eery similarity between the desecration of churches in the height of the French Terror, the destruction of the ‘Four Olds’ during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the toppling of Lenin statues at the fall of the Soviet Union and more recently in 2020, the movement which coalesced to abjure Confederate and other slavery-associated symbols. All revolutions seek to destroy the old order to affirm the new, it is said.
In Idols of ISIS, Aaron Tugendhaft, a descendent of Iraqi... [read more]
