Lorrie Moore, I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home
reviewed by Stuart Walton
Towards the end of Lorrie Moore's fourth novel, its doubly bereaved central character asks, in defiant inverse of the classical philosophical query first posed by Leibniz, 'why is there now nothing rather than something?' In a world where popular sentiment hears only a wrong note in the word 'died' , what happens to those who pass, pass on, pass away, leave us, vanish? Newly bereft of both his nearest and his dearest, Finn finds himself reflecting on what it all adds up to. 'Suffering then... [read more]
A woman is wandering around an Athens flea market. Blue-haired, 34 years old, and feeling untethered, Elsa Anderson is an orphaned piano prodigy. She has just walked off stage midway through a performance in Vienna, where she switched from playing a Rachmaninov concerto to playing a composition of her own. From the outside, her identity crisis looks fairly under control — she’s teaching piano, hopping between various European cities, ignoring the calls of her austere piano... [read more]
A preoccupation with matter attends Philip Gross’ new book of poetry, The Thirteenth Angel. This is in keeping with Gross’ themes and concerns in recent years, where he moves into Lucretian mode, assembling modes of being and matter as poetic thought, like a scientist at work. The Thirteenth Angel moves out of the shadows of his previous books, by placing matter — its presence and absence, and the interplay — as part of larger questions of embodiment, attention and breath. Gross however... [read more]
Excellence in art, Aristotle suggested, is founded on melancholy, and this viewpoint found strong support in the Renaissance and Romantic poetry traditions. ‘Do you not see’, John Keats famously asked, ‘how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?’ The quotation is often invoked by those who argue that suffering and angst are essential for creativity. It may also have informed Anne Carson’s remark that, if prose is a house, poetry is a... [read more]
From 1860 to 1960, over one hundred thousand British children were forcibly emigrated to Canada in order to work as indentured labourers and domestic servants. Known, with extraordinarily callous irony, as Home Children, they were for the most part children of poverty and deprivation, whose families were considered by the patrician philanthropists overseeing the programme to be unable to care for them. Yet as Liz Berry notes in the introduction to her compelling new book of poetry, The Home... [read more]
From his first novel, Ruth, to his latest, Brian, Jeremy Cooper has been remarkably, even grimly consistent in his inclination towards narrative portraiture. The simple titles are deceptively suggestive; his characters are intensely individual but edge towards anonymity. There is nothing secretly noble here. Men and women are mulched back into what feels particularly true and this verité approach extends to the form of the novels, which are reliant on letters, diaries, and catalogues of... [read more]
We carry within us our own shadow. This inner darkness, this phantom self, is a pillar of Jungian thought — and a guiding influence on what Christiana Spens calls ‘The Fear’, a broad existential state that forms the backbone of this philosophical memoir. The Fear, writes Spens, is the ‘emotional reality of oppression, whether it manifests as an individual battle with repressed memories and desires, or overt socio-political conflicts’.
Alongside these metaphysical observations... [read more]
Adam Shatz, Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination
reviewed by Gabriel Flynn
The title of Adam Shatz’s new essay collection, Writers and Missionaries, alludes to a remark by the novelist V. S. Naipaul during an interview with Shatz: ‘Ultimately you have to make a choice — are you a writer, or are you a missionary?’ Although Shatz finds Naipaul’s distinction too crude, he agrees there is a tension between the writer, ‘who describes things as he or she sees them,’ and the missionary, ‘who describes things as he or she wishes they might be under the... [read more]
Dorothee Elmiger, trans. Megan Ewing, Out of the Sugar Factory
reviewed by Jim Henderson
Dorothee Elmiger’s Out of the Sugar Factory is classified as fiction, but halfway through it, the narrator, an author at work on a book that seems to be Out of the Sugar Factory itself, tells her editor that what she’s writing is a ‘research report’, not a novel. Argufying over categorisations only gets you so far in coming to grips with a book like this, but her description isn’t wrong. The plot of Out of the Sugar Factory consists of this narrator, whose life tracks with the... [read more]
What I remember is the camomile, the ‘plash’ of the water, the ‘shameless beauty’ of the sycamore trees. These are some of the visual fragments from the opening pages of Beloved, Toni Morrison’s commemorative love song to the ‘sixty million and more’ Africans and African Americans who suffered, endured and fought the horrors of slavery. They are not my memories nor are they exactly Morrison’s, but those of her main character, the other beloved of the text, Sethe, whose mind... [read more]
