March 2020. This was the month our world changed. As a country, we have by and large kept calm and carried on, following the same stiff-upper-lip stubbornness and conspiratorial suspiciousness that made it impossible for the Labour Party to win the 2019 election. My grandparents email me obviously fake ‘news’ items (‘Hold your breath for 10 seconds. If you can do it, you don’t have the virus!’; ‘Is COVID-19 a bio-attack?’). Each new conspiracy has been forwarded to them in... [read more]
‘What sick shit within you responds to him?’ asks a girlfriend of Frank Baltimore, the protagonist of Tom Lutz’s debut novel, Born Slippy. She’s referring to Frank’s intermittent friend/failed co-worker Dmitry, and it’s a good question. Because Frank is a humble man, a carpenter who builds homes with his hands to save money for his estranged children. Dmitry is at best a shallow chauvinist, at worst a sociopathic and misogynistic pig. A man who slips out of any knot, who lives... [read more]
Rosanna Mclaughlin, Double-Tracking: Studies in Duplicity
reviewed by Eleanor Green
Double-Tracking is, aptly, side-splitting. Its discursive structure and its cynical tone place it as a diametrically opposite text to, for example, Andrea Long-Chu’s Females (Verso, 2019). Whereas a review of Females entitled ‘The Limits of the Bit’ in the LA Review of Books criticised how seriously it took, and was able to take, a subject that seems absurd (‘everyone is female and everyone hates it’), Double-Tracking takes a very straightforward subject and refuses to take it... [read more]
Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House is a novel that stares back. The burning gaze of the young woman who adorns the front cover is transfixing. It is Maeve Conroy, sister of narrator Danny, painted as a young girl by the artist she is in love with. It promises a lot on first sight: intimacy, connection, aesthetic beauty, the compelling pull to look. This book, in its cover alone, promises so much of a story that I couldn’t help but hold it to those expectations and judge.
Although Patchett... [read more]
Whatever else Surge is, it never seems quite itself. The most prominent way this is the case is that it’s the title both of Jay Bernard’s first full collection and a performance based upon it (a ‘scratch’ version of the performance, Surge: Side A, won the Ted Hughes Award in 2017). Both emerge from Bernard’s archival research at the George Padmore Institute, investigating the records of the 1981 New Cross Massacre: a fire that claimed the lives of thirteen young black people, still... [read more]
Paul B. Preciado, trans. Charlotte Mandell, An Apartment on Uranus
reviewed by A.V. Marraccini
Paul B. Preciado’s An Apartment on Uranus is a manifold queer utopian project against what he calls the ‘necropolitics’ of both the loosely ‘Western’ state and the requisite regimes of the body it necessitates. It is a project that’s eminently clear and accessible. The pieces that comprise the book were originally written for the French newspaper Libération, and are translated by Charlotte Mandell in an equally lucid and public-facing prose. This carries a certain irony given... [read more]
Owen Worth, Morbid Symptoms: The Global Rise of the Far-Right
reviewed by Neil Dawson
In the post-Cold War world, a commitment to free market capitalism became widely accepted as the only legitimate approach to economics and politics. In other words, neoliberalism achieved hegemony. Challenges to this order have emerged in recent years, and as the academic Owen Worth shows in Morbid Symptoms, the most serious have come not from the left, as we might expect, but from the far right, from the likes of Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, and Marine Le Pen. Worth’s aims in his book are... [read more]
Annie Ernaux’s I Remain in Darkness is both a new and an old book. It was written from 1983 to 1986, published in French in 1997, translated into English in 1999, and has been republished by Fitzcaraldo Editions in 2019. Its author is a renowned memoirist, at 79 years old the grande dame of French literature. But when she wrote this book she was in her forties, not especially well-known, and yet to win the major prizes that would come to litter her career. As readers of this new edition then,... [read more]
Michael Gove was worried. It was the beginning of 2013. He had been Education Secretary for nearly three years. His friend and patron, David Cameron, had given him huge freedom to implement a radical right-wing programme to transform England’s schools. Gove had fought savage battles and made powerful enemies, but the Education Secretary felt he was making progress. The modern Conservative Party was meant to be all about his ambitious agenda of domestic reform. But now the Prime Minister was... [read more]
Richard Seymour's much-anticipated book about social media takes its title from Paul Klee's Twittering Machine, a surrealist painting which expresses a kind of horror of automation, of birdsong driven by crankshaft. Although it delivers a solid analysis of the driving mechanisms of social media and the commercial imperatives that have shaped them, the insistent focus of Seymour's critique is on the eagerness with which users of these technologies have allowed ourselves to be cast as automata,... [read more]
