Arthur Rose, Literary Cynics: Borges, Beckett, Coetzee
reviewed by Rafe McGregor
Arthur Rose is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of English Studies at Durham University and one of the two general directors of the Journal of Badiou Studies (with Michael J. Kelly of Binghamton University), which is a rebranding of the International Journal of Badiou Studies. The latter made academic news last year when it was revealed as the victim of the Tripodi Hoax. As explained on the 3 Quarks Daily blog in April 2016, Philippe Huneman and Anouk Barberousse (both of the... [read more]
Heather McDaid & Laura Jones (eds.), Nasty Women: A Collection of Essays + Accounts on What It Is to Be a Woman in the 21st Century
reviewed by Thom Cuell
Conceived in the wake of Donald Trump’s infamous comments about Hillary Clinton, and subsequent election victory, the essay collection Nasty Women was launched via Kickstarter on New Year’s Day 2017, with a target of £6,000. This goal was reached within three days, and after receiving support from the likes of Margaret Atwood on Twitter, the publisher 404 Ink went on to raise a total of £22,156 from over 1,300 supporters. The turnaround time was amazing: the anthology was commissioned in... [read more]
‘There is no home here,’ reads the epigraph by Christopher Isherwood that sets the scene and tone for The Burning Ground, the prose debut of poet Adam O’Riordan. It’s an appropriate prelude to this impressive range of short stories. O’Riordan’s poetic vision explores the male experience by juxtaposing a dreamy Californian landscape and a dreamlike romanticism with rather purgatorial characters and a blurred sense of narrative endings.
This isn’t a typical debut. There is no... [read more]
Vickie Cooper and David Whyte (eds.), The Violence of Austerity
reviewed by Abigail Rhodes
At the turn of the century an obscure home office poster was discovered in Barter Books, a shop in Alnwick, Northumberland, with the motivational slogan ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’. It had been prepared in 1939 for use in case of a coastal invasion of the UK by the Nazis and was designed to steady the national nerves in the face of such a calamitous event. The poster was never used in these circumstances but became a fashionable, ironic, comedy catchphrase after its unearthing in 2000. The... [read more]
The essay began – notoriously – as a denizen of the scrap-bin of literature. Montaigne called his efforts, which established the form in European writing, a collection merely of 'tentative attempts' at philosophy, focused on his self, 'a topic so frivolous and so vain' as to waste the reader's time. Addison and Steele's pieces for the Tatler and Spectator were commercial products, dashed off to fill column inches. Samuel Johnson's alternately wandering and stentorian essays for The Idler... [read more]
Laurent Binet, trans. Sam Taylor, The 7th Function of Language
reviewed by Marc Farrant
Laurent Binet’s The 7th Function of Language has all the hallmarks of a romp. It features murder, international intrigue, factional strife, exploding train stations, not to mention a compelling historical conceit. The year is 1980, French philosopher Roland Barthes is strolling through Paris after a luncheon with the French presidential candidate Francois Mitterand when he is mowed down in the Rue des Ecoles by a laundry van. An accident? Is it possible that sheer chance would bring to an end... [read more]
The word that most immediately springs to mind when considering Eley Wiliams’s debut short story collection is ‘abundant’. From personal observation, most contemporary collections of short fiction contain 10 to 12 stories – Attrib. clocks in at 17. Williams’ use of language strains the limits of intelligibility with its polysemy, inventiveness and sheer brio. This is how one character describes a landmine-detecting rat: ‘I’ve personally raised this little mite, this godhead, this... [read more]
The first thing a reader interested in colour and design will be struck by about Kassia St Clair’s new book, The Secret Lives of Colour, is the physical beauty of the publication. The book offers ‘potted’ histories as of 75 shades of colour that have interested her the most. The cover is white and speckled with colour dot imprints. The reader is greeted with a spectrum in the frontispiece. We then get graphs, charts and quotes of famous minds describing colours. Each potted history has a... [read more]
The rural home of poet, editor, and critic Les Murray lies around three hundred kilometres north-east of Sydney, Australia. The area known as Bunyah – a native word meaning ‘bark’ – is a hilly landscape with dense forests, expansive paddocks and farmland. Bunyah Creek, which becomes the Wang Wauk River before reaching the Pacific Ocean, cuts across this landscape and sources many of the sandy lakes characteristic of the area. The place Murray calls his ‘spirit country’ is... [read more]
Is there anything to be said for old age? It all depends on what is to become of us. Will it be recollections in tranquillity or futile raging on the blasted heath? 'We breathe, we change,' Beckett's Hamm says to his servant Clov. 'We lose our hair, our teeth! Our bloom! Our ideals!' – the living reassurance that Nature hasn't forgotten us. A second childishness and mere oblivion, sans everything, doesn't sound too bad when weighed against the terrors of the first childhood, adolescent... [read more]
