Christopher Clason (ed.), E. T. A. Hoffmann: Transgressive Romanticism
reviewed by Polly Dickson
If you’re willing to loiter in the cold in the cemetery at Hallesches Tor, Berlin, on the evening of the 24 January, you will find yourself witness to a curious spectacle. Every year, on the anniversary of ETA Hoffmann’s birthday, members of the Hoffmann Society gather at his grave to commemorate his life. Their festivities include drinking, reading from his works and letters, and pouring wine onto his grave, to the cheer ‘In Hoffmanno!’ It may come as a surprise to a general reader,... [read more]
Peter Szendy, trans. Jan Plug, The Supermarket of the Visible: Toward a General Economy of Images
reviewed by Calum Watt
The Supermarket of the Visible is a path-breaking new book on the relation between images and money. Peter Szendy is a musicologist, philosopher and professor of comparative literature at Brown University. This short book consists of three film theory lectures originally given in Sydney in 2014, followed by further brief texts named ‘additional features’ or ‘deleted scenes’. Szendy’s book was originally published in French by Éditions de Minuit at the end of 2017 and immediately... [read more]
A quarter-century after its release, the Manic Street Preachers’ third album sounds as otherworldly and as close-at-hand as ever. A still-extraordinary listen, chilling and scalding by turns, the album is immersed in politics, sex, death, war, religion and all other subjects unfit for the dinner table. David Evans’ addition to Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series is a careful and thoughtful examination of The Holy Bible that manages to make sense of an album with which, as I discovered when writing... [read more]
Will Ashon, Chamber Music: Enter the Wu-Tang (in 36 Pieces)
reviewed by James Cook
‘Instead of opening a book,’ Will Ashon tells us on page 25 of his second work of non-fiction, ‘you’ve opened the box of a jigsaw puzzle.’ This assertion – or caution, perhaps – is apposite. Chamber Music examines the history of New York rap collective Wu-Tang Clan, and their first album, 1993’s Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), often described as ‘the greatest hip hop album of all time’. But instead of an orthodox band biography and pedestrian track-by-track appreciation,... [read more]
Tunnels are both ways into and out of trouble, dug around obstacles or right through them. Vision is indispensable, but few would say they had had visions. Like a waiter carrying drinks on a tray, the balance of opposites in each word collapses when they are compounded; ‘tunnel’ and ‘vision’ each mean several things, ‘tunnel vision’ means one thing.
The essays that make up Kevin Breathnach’s debut collection are interested in the question of what it means to be one thing, and... [read more]
Richard J. Evans, Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History
reviewed by Ian Birchall
Historians do not sit outside of history, dispassionately assessing the ‘facts’. How they perceive even the remote past is conditioned by the world they live in – and by the way they live in that world. Of no-one is this truer than Eric Hobsbawm, one of the 20th century's most successful historians, a prolific writer whose books have been translated into more than 50 languages. Seven years after his death, Richard Evans has given us the history of the historian. It is a long story –... [read more]
In 2016, Tilted Axis Press published an English translation of Hwang Jungeun’s novel, One Hundred Shadows. It was a perfect example of what can be done within the confines of a short novel: it told an atmospheric story of two people living impoverished lives on the fringes of society, laced with a potent dose of the uncanny. It portrayed the frustrations of life in a region that might be developed out of existence at any moment, and was charged with the potential of human connection and joy... [read more]
Bhaskar Sunkara, The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality
reviewed by Neil Dawson
In the mid-19th century, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels confidently declared that capitalism’s demise and the proletariat’s victory were ‘equally inevitable’. Only the most Panglossian radical socialist would make this claim today. The recent record of capitalism in countries such as America and Britain may be marked by extreme inequality, financial crisis, and popular discontent, but that doesn’t mean we’re on route to somewhere better. This is the writer and activist Bhaskar... [read more]
On a grey day in Edinburgh at the tail-end of the nineteenth century, a young Scotchman – full of talent and promise – looks out through his shop window and sees little to stir the spirit. The heavy rain has turned the sooty buildings near black, and the sky hangs crushingly low. He optimistically polishes and replaces his glasses, taking a second look. The scene remains bleak.
The young man is Brodie Moncur, a piano tuner for an Edinburgh piano maker, and he is at the beginning of an... [read more]
Sophie Robinson’s Rabbit is like hearing your neighbour cry through the walls. It’s distressing to hear, you feel like a voyeur, and you can’t help, because going round there would be another violation. But what if the neighbour was really playing a recording of that crying through your wall? That’s what the book is about. Over-egged, paratactic, coy about its own artifice, yet keen to explore the limits of personal fragility, Rabbit whips us through snatches of animal abuse, internet... [read more]
