They’ve been busy. Venus as a Bear arrives scarcely two years after Vahni Capildeo’s last full collection, the Forward Prize-winning Measures of Expatriation, and even then it doesn’t contain everything we’ve seen from them since, an 'agender [writer] in a female body', Capildeo takes they/them pronouns. For their funniest turn in last year’s 'Persephone in Oulipo', they offer a parody of ‘mainstream English lyric’. A lyric ‘I’ narrates the experience of sitting down to write... [read more]
After reading Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s second novel, Call Me Zebra, I was reminded of a piece by the artist and sculptor Mel Chin. In ‘Circumfessional Hymenal Sea (Portrait of Jacques Derrida)’ an ivory tower, within which further towers appear to be enclosed, rests under a ‘sea’ of books. The perimeter is enclosed with hardbacks, and in the centre are reams of pages rolling and concertinaed into one another. According to Chin, the work originated from a dream based on... [read more]
Martin Jay, Reason after Its Eclipse: On Late Critical Theory
reviewed by Simi Freund
The last few years have seen a renewed interest in the work of the Frankfurt School. With the ongoing political turbulence affecting the liberal societies of the Western world, people are seeking theoretical tools to lay bare the insidious underpinnings of Western modernity, the coercive tactics sewn into apparently emancipatory concepts like Enlightenment, progress, freedom, democracy, technology and capitalism. With an increasing awareness of the darker side of these concepts, and as the... [read more]
To read Ian Holding’s What Happened to Us is to be drawn into a state of suspension, to hover with a child, a family and a country on the edge of possible unravelling. Set in suburban Harare between the hey- and dying- days of Robert Mugabe’s presidency, the novel circles around the night a family home is shattered by a brutal break-in. Far from being a one-dimensional portrayal of crime in sub-Saharan Africa, this novel’s depiction of family trauma is presented within a context of a... [read more]
Olga Tokarczuk, trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
reviewed by Antonia Cundy
Reading a novel when you know that you are going to review it is an odd thing. No matter how many times you approach the exercise – whether you diligently insist on reading it once through like a ‘normal’ reader, saving note-taking until a second read, or not – it is impossible to completely escape the reviewer’s mindset. Whilst the story unfolds, another narrative begins to write itself in your own head, the narrative of your review itself. This is particularly true when what... [read more]
Lara Feigel, Free Woman: Life, Liberation and Doris Lessing
reviewed by Emily Bueno
‘There were too many weddings that summer,’ writes Lara Feigel at the opening of Free Woman. Forced to endure a succession of bourgeois nuptials – all take-home marmalade and hand-sewn Liberty print bunting – Feigel, a reader in modern literature at King’s College London, becomes increasingly truculent. Why does it bother her so? In large part, it’s the oppressive uniformity: the ‘apparent assumption’ that marriage ‘remained the only way to live’, with the entire room... [read more]
If I were to say, ‘God, I love this book’ a few things are clear: (1) a reviewer (2) is advocating (3) in an emotional register (4) the book under review. What cannot be known is what is what I mean by ‘God’, beyond upping the declarative nature of the sentence and taking the Lord’s name in vain. However, if you’re reading this in the Anglophone West, there will be an assumption. Something around an outmoded intercessionary being that church / synagogue / mosque goers have decided... [read more]
Laura Freeman, The Reading Cure: How Books Restored My Appetite
reviewed by Stephanie Sy-Quia
There is a variety of ways in which I, a woman, could begin a review of a book about another woman relaying her experience of living with anorexia. I could steep my response in the personal, discussing my own relationship with food; or relaying the experience of watching a schoolmate slowly starving herself over the course of our teens (not quite to death, but to infertility, which is after all, wouldn’t you agree, the same thing). I could dangle details of her condition before you: how her... [read more]
Lena Andersson, trans. Saskia Vogel, Acts of Infidelity
reviewed by Thea Hawlin
‘There are neither words nor syntax for falling in love,’ Lena Andersson observes, ‘however many attempts have been made to parade it through the alphabet.’ Acts of Infidelity might be said to be such a parade. In her long-anticipated sequel to Wilful Disregard (2013), Andersson gives us a book about the dangers of loving the attached. An act between two people in an affair is always more than the sum of its apparent parts, every smile, every kiss, every action forever accompanied by a... [read more]
Raj Patel & Jason W. Moore, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet
reviewed by Peter Mitchell
I recently re-read Moby-Dick, because I know how to have fun, and found myself coming down a with a moderate case of metaphor envy. How convenient for Melville, I thought, that he just so happened to have been hunting the the perfect vehicle for his grand mad investigation into capitalism, murder and the cosmos. And how convenient that both that vehicle and the means of hunting it – an enormous floating cow full of magical oils that wrestles giant squid to the death in the most crushing and... [read more]
