What is literature? This question continues to elude a satisfactory answer accounting for the all the intricate nuances and inconsistencies of writing, interpretation, imagination and reality. It is with this conviction that Lars Iyer is able to write, in his introduction to Stephen Mitchelmore’s This Space of Writing, that this collection of essays is for ‘the writer for whom literature is in some way a problem.’ It is not so much that Mitchelmore attempts to definitively answer this... [read more]
Historically, war has supplied the ultimate proving ground for men: it’s arguably the most challenging test of strength and character, not to mention survival. In cultures the world over, this rite of passage has proclaimed that boys would engage in battle and emerge as men. For women, the equivalent is surely childbirth, especially in the days before modern medicine. Childbirth was once so dangerous that women in Renaissance Italy, for example, would promptly prepare a will upon discovering... [read more]
A collection of great short stories, if carefully curated, can have the coherence of a novel, or at the very least a classic album. If Dubliners is the Sgt Pepper of the form, then later collections such as Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love or Annie Proulx’s Close Range are Blood on the Tracks and Hounds of Love respectively. Gods and Angels, the latest brace of stories from veteran Belfast novelist David Park, might well one day qualify as a minor classic – a... [read more]
Jean-Philippe Toussaint, trans. Shaun Whiteside, Football
reviewed by Joe Kennedy
Right at the beginning of the Belgian novelist and filmmaker Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s gnomically titled Football, in a stark epigraphical boot-print on an otherwise immaculate page, we’re told that:
This is a book no-one will like, not intellectuals, who aren’t interested in football, or football-lovers, who will find it too intellectual. But I had to write it, I didn’t want to break the fine thread which connects me to the world.
For any reviewer, this is almost certainly the... [read more]
Hot Milk, the title of Deborah Levy’s sixth book, evokes smothering maternity and the fraught, oftentimes messy dependencies between mothers and children that extend into adulthood. It is an uncomfortable and intriguing title, tantalisingly vague and a little ominous – much befitting of this hypnotic novel. In her previous works, including Beautiful Mutants (1989) and the Man Booker-shortlisted Swimming Home (2011), Levy interrogates the concepts of exile, identity, and the slipperiness and... [read more]
Geert Buelens, Everything to Nothing: The Poetry of the Great War, Revolution and the Transformation of Europe
reviewed by Eleanor Careless
Geert Buelens’ extraordinary, novelistic study of the poetry of the Great War concludes ‘so that was the First World War . . . a Twin Tower every afternoon.' Buelens’ concern to make the events of over a century ago measurable by contemporary standards introduces a radically new perspective to the field of war poetry studies. Rather than replicate the Western European-centric innocence-to-experience narrative popularised in works from LP Hartley’s The Go-Between (1953) to Ian McEwan’s... [read more]
'If I look at any object', says one of the residents of his flat in Saffron Court, Bath, in an interview with the artist Stephen Willats about life in the building, 'it tells a story.’ This book collects some of the interviews and photographs collected by Willats over several decades of work in planned housing, from the 1970s through to the 2000s – mostly, if not exclusively, in post-war, high-rise estates. Willats' extensive work on housing (never just 'houses') and the people who live in... [read more]
Set in a missionary school in China in the 1940s, In a Land of Paper Gods is a religious novel, not only in content but in form. Rebecca Mackenzie's prose rings with religious sentiment: 'Even at that young age, I knew to bury these bones in the soft earth, to decorate the mounds with feather, shell and twig, to weave over a litany of prayers, calling to Jesus, the River God, the wind.' Hushed reverence, a sort of delicate holiness, almost surrounds the words. The religion within the story... [read more]
‘The whole bent of my nature is toward confession,’ admits the unnamed narrator of Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs to You. It is this tendency towards confession that gives this hugely accomplished debut its poignancy and its emotional incisiveness. Greenwell’s novel is an attempt to confess both desire and shame in order to better unravel the interwoven, psychologically destructive force of these conjoined emotions. It is a tale of unrequited love that seeks to document the potentially... [read more]
Adam S. Miller, The Gospel According to David Foster Wallace: Boredom and Addiction in an Age of Distraction
reviewed by Elsa Court
Adam S. Miller’s The Gospel According to David Foster Wallace: Boredom and Addiction in an Age of Distraction is the first book to address religious language and ideas within the work of one of the most celebrated of America’s contemporary novelists. If the book has one precedent, a chapter dedicated to Wallace in Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly’s All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age (2011), it makes a strong case against it. Taking... [read more]
