Maryse Condé, trans. Richard Philcox, The Wondrous and Tragic Life of Ivan and Ivana
reviewed by Mersiha Bruncevic
Early one morning in Paris, I stood at the crossing between Rue des Barres and Pont Louis-Philippe. Halfway between one side of the road and the other, on one of those small paved islands, I waited for the morning traffic to roll by. I was on my way to work in a café, because the Wi-Fi at home was down, annoyingly. Less troubling were the three young guys standing next to me. Their hair was dutifully short, their eyes indifferent but vigilant, and their hands were clutching machine guns. On a... [read more]
Srinivas Rayaprol, Angular Desire: Selected Poems and Prose
reviewed by Mantra Mukim
‘why did you go to burma? / prickface i said/ what’s there in india?’
Arun Kolatkar’s wax eloquent question at the end of ‘Three Cups of Tea’ is definitely one of the paramount questions of Indian English poetry, to which plenty rejoinders have been delivered in the 1960s and beyond. The question brings into play one of the many concerns in early Indian English writing — that of representation. What is there in the newly-born nation that demands attention, what is there that is... [read more]
Camille Laurens, trans. Willard Wood, Little Dancer Aged Fourteen
reviewed by Adrian Nathan West
In Britain and America, Degas is a cliché. I briefly studied art history at university, and have an abiding amateur interest in the subject, but my closest association with him is the sun-bleached posters of his ballerinas lining the walls of the shabby roadside dance school where a friend’s girlfriend taught ballet basics to ungainly preteens. Degas is the kind of artist well-represented at poster shops; people buy his prints for sentimental reasons, or just to keep their house from looking... [read more]
At the start of the final novel in what is destined to be known as Jeet Thayil's Bombay trilogy, its central character Dominic Ullis is sitting on a flight just coming in to land in that city, transitioning between an imperfect oblivion brought on by 20mg of the prescription soporific, zolpidem, and a wakefulness that hasn't quite yet earned the name, the woman next to him thriftily smuggling his airline cutlery as well as her own into a gigantic handbag, his wife's ashes in a box cradled on... [read more]
Female identity, traditionally feminine aesthetics and the dynamic between men and women are central concerns for fiction author Sophie Mackintosh. In her Booker-longlisted debut novel The Water Cure, Mackintosh explored the relationships between three sisters raised in the belief that men are poisonous. In her new novel Blue Ticket, she pushes the exploration further by focusing on pregnancy, thus raising fundamental questions: what does it mean to be female, within and without female biology?... [read more]
Several years ago I attended a reading by Alan Hollinghurst at which Germaine Greer was in the audience. During the Q & A, she expostulated the impossibility of authentically representing one’s other: straight people couldn’t write gay relationships, nor gay men lesbian relationships and so on. After this lengthy outlay, she left the provocation hanging with, ‘Well, what do you think?’ Hollinghurst replied, ‘I’ve never really thought about it,’ then turned to another raised hand... [read more]
Emily Cockayne, Rummage: A History of the Things We Have Reused, Recycled and Refused to Let Go
reviewed by Anna Parker
What is it that is so beguiling about used things? One of my favourite writers is Barbara Pym, whose novels include extremely sharp observations about the social lives and manners of the middle class in post-war England, always delivered with warm humour and a unique generosity towards the ordinary spinsters that serve as her principal characters. I lent a friend one of her books. ‘These jumble sales are hotbeds of intrigue,’ she texted me later.
Nearly every Pym contains a scene at a... [read more]
I first encountered Megan Hunter’s dark magic in Libreria, a bookshop off Brick Lane in London. She was reading from her debut novel, The End We Start From, the haunting story of a new mother fleeing flooded, apocalyptic London. In 2017 the book had just come out and Hunter was in the middle of writing a second – a quite different experience, she said. The first one happened very quickly; in some ways, authors have been writing their first novel all their lives. She was reluctant to say... [read more]
Confessional poems have been a mainstay of Western poetry since the middle of the last century. People love the theatre of confessions; it's exciting to think that someone is telling you the truth, or telling a secret. In its original religious meaning, to confess is to avow one's faith in spite of persecution. In Old French confesser had a figurative meaning to 'harm, hurt or make suffer.' Go further back and you find that the root bha, meaning to speak, tell or say, has another meaning, which... [read more]
Hegel speaks of language in terms of contagion. Language transmits subjectivity like an infection. This virus passes between speaker and listener, meaning resonates. With terms like transmission and reception, we see the taxonomic ground shared by language and disease. That this descriptive metaphor feels more pertinent today might be ascribed to a kind of accident, a reflection of present socio-historical and biopolitical conditions. These two ideas, contamination and accident, flow throughout... [read more]
