Jenny Diski, Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told?
reviewed by Andrew Key
I miss Jenny Diski. I started reading the London Review of Books in earnest when she started publishing her cancer diary there, from September 2014 onwards. At that time I was living on the West Coast of the US, somewhere far enough away that the LRB only arrived (and was placed in the reading room of the library of the university I was attending) two weeks or so after it had been published in the UK. I would use the arrival of each edition to avoid my responsibilities, often skipping class,... [read more]
It is unfortunate the way that good writing — and particularly writing by women — can be prodded into banal book jackets. The promise offered, for something sweepingly emotional in which the reader will become helplessly involved, pigeonholes writers and readers in a way that undercuts the idiosyncrasies of individual authors' books, often along gendered lines. Looking at the titles of Evie Wyld's books, it would be easy to presume that they are gentler and less serious than they are. The... [read more]
Kevin Hickson, Jasper Miles & Harry Taylor (eds.), Peter Shore: Labour’s Forgotten Patriot
reviewed by Robin McGhee
Why Europe? For more than half a century, a small but committed cadre of Eurosceptics have obsessed over our relationship with the continent. It takes precedence over almost every other issue: health, inequality, defence, even the other great questions in foreign policy like our relationship with America or China. Occasionally this monomaniacal obsession has bubbled to the surface and exploded, enveloping our whole country in the smelly gobbets of trade negotiations and fishing rights, always... [read more]
Some way into Lisa Roberton’s first ‘novel’, Hazel Brown attends a party. She recalls how it was ‘one of those parties in a large and elegant Haussmannian flat on the Right Bank.’ We’re in Paris, the flat’s occupant is a young American and her guests, too, are young Americans, ‘from Columbia and NYU and dressed down.’ Hazel Brown recognises a Haussmann building but hasn’t heard of Columbia or dressing down, and we believe her. Hers is a literary knowledge.
Hazel Brown is... [read more]
Fernanda Melchor, trans. Sophie Hughes, Hurricane Season
reviewed by Liam Harrison
One day, on her way home from school, Norma, a pregnant 13-year-old who is groomed and sexually abused by her stepfather, discovers in a book of fairy tales where the phrase ‘Sunday seven’ comes from. At home she has often been told that it is a terrible thing. Norma initially thinks the phrase might refer to getting her period: ‘on the toilet she discovered her knickers were stained with blood, a maroon, putrid blood that came out of precisely the same hole Pepe had been poking around in... [read more]
Christina Lamb, Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women
reviewed by Jennifer Thomson
In 2014, Angelina Jolie joined the then Foreign Secretary, William Hague, at a summit in London to promote the United Kingdom’s Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict Initiative (PSVI). In the years since its introduction, the movie-star sheen provided by Jolie has faded from PSVI. An Independent Commission for Aid Impact report, released in January of this year, declared that ‘the initiative lacks a clear strategy and overall vision to guide its activities’, and that there is ‘little... [read more]
Gert Hofmann, trans. Eric Mace-Tessler, Veilchenfeld
reviewed by Tom Conaghan
Originally published in Germany in 1986, Veilchenfeld’s appearance in English in 2020 is a timely reminder of our humanity. It was written by Gert Hofmann, a prolific German novelist and academic (as well as father of the poet Michael Hofmann.) Veilchenfeld is set in 1930s Germany during the Nazis' escalating persecution of its Jewish population. Though this is already the subject of innumerable historical accounts, Hofmann’s examination of it in his novel explores the true inhumanity of... [read more]
Romalyn Ante’s debut collection, Antiemetic for Homesickness, opens with an image of snow which so closely resembles flakes of coconut that it leaves its subject bloated. Ante extends these poems as a repetitive documentation, rather than a cure, of a chronic longing for home, the familial and the familiar. Ante grew up in the Philippines and moved to the UK at 16, two years after her mother who worked ‘overseas’ as a nurse. She moves naturally between these two positions in her... [read more]
David Farrier, Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils
reviewed by Nora Castle
‘Language is fossil poetry.’ In his book Landmarks, Robert Macfarlane points to this claim by Ralph Waldo Emerson, explaining that ‘Emerson, as an essayist, sought to reverse this petrifiction and restore the ‘poetic origin’ of words, thereby revealing the originary role of ‘nature’ in language.’ The poet, according to Emerson, ‘re-attaches things to nature and the Whole’ by naming them in their poetry. By illuminating and reinvigorating the origins of words, the poet... [read more]
Anthony McCann, Shadowlands: Fear and Freedom at the Oregon Standoff
reviewed by Louis Amis
It began with a spectacular victory. In April 2014 several hundred protestors gathered in a desert wash between two highway overpasses near the town of Bunkerville, Nevada, and found that they were able to exert their will directly upon the United States government. They confronted a team of federal agents from the Department of the Interior, who were rounding up a herd of unlicensed cattle, and forced them to retreat.
Both sides were heavily armed, but the agents were outnumbered. The... [read more]
