In the 1950s and even as late as the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was common for American Jews to be reluctant to say where their families came from. To be asked about ancestral background could be inferred as suggesting that you were somehow ‘unAmerican’, to use the ugly McCarthy era term. If now ensconced in bourgeois comfort, many immigrant Jews had indeed been Marxists in youth. Names had been clipped or otherwise altered – Krumkotkin to Krumm as for the grandfather of the protagonist... [read more]
Who Is Mary Sue? is a collection that views itself but refuses to comment. It ranges over forms of poetry, essay, confessional writing, witness statement. (It is even part-review itself, for example in ‘a whistle in the gloom’, which considers Pauline Réage’s The Story of O.) Specifically, as in this example from ‘As bread is the body of Christ, so is glass the very flesh of the Devil’, it is aware of the way in which readers view both a text written by a woman and the female writer:... [read more]
Curzio Malaparte, trans. Jenny McPhee, The Kremlin Ball
reviewed by Marcel Inhoff
The Kremlin Ball is an extraordinary book – flawed, incomplete, mad. As literature it is nowhere near Malaparte’s best, and yet its inadequacies make it the pleasurable rarity that it is. It is an unfinished novel, found among the writer’s papers after his death. Composed in large part between his two better-known masterpieces, Kaputt (1944) and The Skin (1949), it breaks new ground for the novelist and scandal-monger. Rather than describe – as the other two books did, often in... [read more]
By all accounts, the city of Rome should have passed into the footnotes of history long ago, a sad victim of multiple sackings, internecine division, depopulation and egregious neglect. Case in point: in the early fifth century, a roaming military force of Visigoths crept uncomfortably far into Italy, bypassing the new capital Ravenna, and encircling Rome. Negotiations faltered, and in 410 CE the city was systematically, scrupulously levelled. The sacking was, by the standards of its age,... [read more]
Andrés Manuel López Obrador, A New Hope for Mexico
reviewed by Daniel Whittall
On July 1st Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, or AMLO as he is more commonly known, and his National Regeneration Party, MORENA, won 53% of the vote in the Mexican elections. Their victory came as little surprise to those who had followed the polling, which had put them as the front runners for some time. Having run twice before – 2006 and 2012 – and lost out marginally, under circumstances where electoral fraud was likely used to overcome him, AMLO now has a governing majority that even the... [read more]
William Blake saw, in the age of scepticism, Enlightenment philosophy heralded as damaging to what he thought was the unifying power of the poetic vision. Should the sun and moon be overcome by doubt ‘they’d immediately go out’ he wrote in ‘Auguries of Innocence’. Andrew Wynn Owen, in his collection which draws on images and arguments from religion and science, also questions what scepticism might mean for our aesthetics. He takes us to a similar time of wonder and trouble.
... [read more]
Francis Plug, the protagonist of Paul Ewen’s novel series of the same name, is ‘a brilliant, deranged new comic creation.’ On the cover of most novels, there is always one quotation like this that stands out against the rest. Looking back through my recent memory; Philip Roth’s American Pastoral is ‘raging and elegiac,’ Gonzalo C. Garcia is ‘a deep and hilarious new literary voice’ and Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled is ‘one of the strangest books in memory.’
At their best,... [read more]
Edouard Louis, trans. Lorin Stein, History of Violence
reviewed by Stephanie Sy-Quia
There is something suspicious in the ways Edouard Louis’s 2014 debut novel, The End of Eddy, has generally been discussed, in its branding as a novel of growing up gay and poor in post-industrial Northern France, which even appears in the blurb. The phrase is now de rigueur for reviewers: ‘growing up gay and poor’ (James Macaulay in The Washington Post), ‘growing up gay in a violent, neglected town in Northern France’ (Kim Willsher in The Guardian), ‘growing up gay in industrial... [read more]
A common reference in reviews of Anna Burns’ Booker Prize-winning Milkman is head judge Kwame Anthony Appiah’s comments in praise of the novel: that it will help people to think about #Metoo, that its portrayal of the Troubles is comparable to the fractured societies in contemporary Lebanon and Syria, and that although it is a difficult read – akin to ‘climbing to the summit of Snowdon’ – it is ‘worth it when you reach the top.’ While Appiah’s associations (which Burns has... [read more]
You know the image: the apartment is clean, airy and quiet with a just ripe fruit bowl. The shower is even in temperature and power, and the bed not too soft, nor too hard (‘Ah’, you sigh at the end of another productive day, ‘just right’). There’s a large desk by the window that looks out across the endless, slowly swaying sea. The sun warms, never glares.
You place, gently, in the middle of the desk, a notepad. Next to it sits a smooth-nibbed pen. The cliché comes to you (a... [read more]
