‘My name is Inez Kissena Fardo. I lived my whole life in Queens and never got anything.’ Fifty years from now, in a world regularly swept by pandemics, Inez is a so-called 'hardy' and thus immune to all diseases. She exploits this adaptive advantage by selling her genetic material — teeth, nails, urine, cells, eggs — to unregulated obstetricians and gynaecologists. At the start of this unnerving, beautifully written dystopian fiction Inez travels from New York to The Farm, a backwater... [read more]
David Foster Wallace's The Pale King features a debate about civics in a stalled elevator, in which a number of characters offer reflections on the perceived decline of civic idealism and national collectivity. The 1960s come in for particular attention, with one character suggesting that in protesting the Vietnam War, a generation of young people asked whether individuals owe ethical duty firstly to the nation or to themselves. As Wallace puts it, the protestors ‘said that their individual... [read more]
Lynne Pearce, Drivetime: Literary Excursions in Automotive Consciousness
reviewed by Elsa Court
The age of the car is coming to an end. Or at least, the driving era as we know it. As we count the benefits (urban, social, environmental) of switching to driverless cars in a not-too-distant future, one looks back on what we may be losing with the activity of driving a personal car. The mind, for example, has a life of its own when the body is at the wheel of a car. Drivers are conscious of the surrounding landscape of the road when they drive, but the activity of driving also delivers us to... [read more]
Amílcar Cabral, trans. Dan Wood, Resistance and Decolonization
reviewed by Rafe McGregor
Amílcar Cabral was born in Portuguese Guinea in 1923, trained as an agricultural engineer in Lisbon, and returned to the colony to become one of the founding members of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) in 1956. After six years of unsuccessful civil protest, the PAIGC took up arms against Portuguese rule and opened hostilities in the Guinea-Bissau War of Independence with an assault on a military garrison in 1963. Cabral was assassinated ten years later,... [read more]
Evija Trofimova, Paul Auster’s Writing Machine: A Thing to Write With
reviewed by Alex Wealands
Paul Auster once stated in an interview that all of his books are in fact the same book. Whilst this may seem like a playful misdirection from the author, anyone familiar with Auster’s work will be aware of the interconnections woven throughout his entire oeuvre, which Evija Trofimova has explored in Paul Auster’s Writing Machine: A Thing to Write With. Cigarettes or cigarillos, typewriters, notebooks, New York, names, doppelgängers, themes of chance and fate – these are all motifs that... [read more]
Alex Nunns, The Candidate: Jeremy Corbyn’s Improbable Path to Power
reviewed by Daniel Whittall
Where did Jeremy Corbyn come from? For decades he had been in the minority as a left Labour MP, his columns appearing in the comparatively obscure Morning Star rather than the more mainstream newspapers. He had stuck firmly to his socialist principles, defying the Labour whip consistently, especially during the years of New Labour. Alex Nunns’ The Candidate superbly brings into clarity the three key processes that facilitated Corbyn’s rise.
First, and often unappreciated by other writers... [read more]
Stuart Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School
reviewed by Stuart Walton
The Grand Hotel Abyss is not currently taking bookings. There is a two-year waiting list for its Economy rooms, its Superior Doubles are block-booked by stag weekenders, and the Executive Suites are largely given over to elderly residents and myself, whom it would be positively dangerous to move by now. For those who may never get to see it first-hand though, books about the establishment continue to proliferate. The Brazilian philosopher Vladimir Safatle's Grande Hotel Abismo (2012) appeared... [read more]
Lauren Elkin, Flaneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London
reviewed by Helen Tyson
When the bombs fell on London in 1940 and 1941, Virginia Woolf, devastated, wrote to a friend that it ‘raked my heart’ to see ‘the passion of my life, that is the City of London,’ destroyed. Her 1927 essay ‘Street Haunting: A London Adventure’ is a testimony to that passion. Woolf’s narrator describes the charms of walking in London on a winter’s evening, and revels in the ‘irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow’. She embraces the sense of anonymity we feel... [read more]
The first thing to draw attention to in this book, by the Italian editor of great distinction Robert Calasso, is its title. The art of macramé, the art of fly fishing perhaps; but the Art of the Publisher strikes one initially as strange. But Calasso is of the old school where every detail of a book is fussed over – the jacket, the blurb (which he describes as the editor`s mission statement) and the typography – not to mention the hours on editing the author's text. Calasso writes short ... [read more]
Towards the end of his valuable new biography of Edward Upward, Peter Stansky charts the tidal course of the communist novelist’s literary reputation: occasional waves of recognition interspersed with long periods of neglect. Upward was a key figure among the young writers of the 1930s, a close friend of Christopher Isherwood and well-acquainted with both WH Auden and Stephen Spender. He dropped out of view as teaching and political work – he was a committed member of the Communist Party... [read more]