The White Stones (1969) is, for me, a daily book. That is not to say that I read it over breakfast. But I think of some words from this great work of philosophical lyricism every day, as I go about my business in a provincial English city sixty miles from the one in which they were written: waking to ‘the sky cloudy / and the day packed into the crystal’; going to work with ‘a set rhythm of / the very slight hopefulness’; noticing ‘a thickening in the words / as the coins themselves... [read more]
The thread that runs through Yann Martel’s new novel is surprising and enigmatic: the Iberian rhinoceros. The rhinoceros, or the concept of a real-life rhinoceros living in Portugal, appears throughout the novel’s three parts. It is linked with mystery, religion and that most Portuguese of words, saudade. Martel’s first of three sad and widowed men, Tomás, first notes of the sad disappearance of the rhinoceros:
Despite its ungraceful appearance, he has always lamented the fate of the... [read more]
Tara Forrest, Realism as Protest: Kluge, Schlingensief, Haneke
reviewed by Alex Fletcher
A maxim routinely asserted by politicians when confronted with a future that does not simply perpetuate the present state of things is that one must be realistic. As the German filmmaker and writer Alexander Kluge observes: ‘Public opinion is very strongly determined by people who … furnish themselves in reality as if in a tank or knight’s armour.’ This realistic predisposition to the status quo is reinforced by a mainstream media that blocks any capacity to conceive of how reality... [read more]
KM Newton, Modernizing George Eliot: The Writer as Artist, Proto-Modernist, Cultural Critic
reviewed by Helen Tope
George Eliot’s sweeping, panoramic novels of 19th-century life form an integral part of the British literary canon; it is hard to think of a writer more ‘establishment’ than Eliot. In Modernizing George Eliot: The Writer as Artist, Proto-Modernist, Cultural Critic, KM Newton goes about the business of challenging the critical view of George Eliot as a conservative figure. Instead of seeing her work as mired in Victorian conventionality, Newton proposes a radical re-interpretation,... [read more]
'Free Verse' as Formal Restraint. Surely the quotation marks are in the wrong place? We all know what we mean by 'free verse,’ give or take, but 'formal restraint' is up for grabs – and, indeed, Andrew Crozier succeeded in doing what he set out to only by employing a very odd definition of the words. Here are the first two sentences of the abstract (the book, I should mention, is his 1973 PhD thesis, published now for the first time with an introduction by Ian Brinton, and the Examiner's... [read more]
Alfie Bown, Enjoying It: Candy Crush and Capitalism
reviewed by Stuart Walton
The status of enjoyment within the cultural economy of capitalism has been in question at least since it was posited by Marx and Engels that capitalism, despite its own best intentions, is a machine for generating misery. It makes possible a flourishing cultural superstructure, to which only the economically privileged and educated have access, while for the rest there is only reduction to the animal functions of biological existence (eating, drinking, having sex), the solace of religion, and... [read more]
Literary stories about immigration and refugees could not be more timely. Maxine Beneba Clarke’s debut collection, Foreign Soil, was first published two years ago in Australia after winning an award for best unpublished manuscript. It now comes to the UK amid heated political debate over immigration threats to domestic security, in the wake of terror attacks in Brussels and in the run-up to the EU referendum.
Clarke, an Australian slam poetry champion of Afro-Caribbean descent, explores... [read more]
Stefan Collini, Common Writing: Essays on Literary Culture and Public Debate
reviewed by Rafe McGregor
Stefan Collini is Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature at Cambridge and although he claims that the two fields joined by the conjunction are not readily distinguishable, Common Writing fits firmly in the former category. In his review of The Letters of T.S. Eliot Vol.2: 1923-1925 (Faber, 2009) in the second chapter, Collini notes that the letters constitute a guide to Eliot’s editing (of the Criterion) rather than to his critical or literary practice. In a similar vein,... [read more]
That Paris under German occupation was a brutal and frightening place (and far, far worse if you were a Jew) will come as no surprise. But even to those who think they know something of the period David Drake’s fascinating book will provide a mass of new and illuminating information. Based on ten years’ research and a range of sources including the memories of survivors and police archives, this is a detailed and vivid narrative of 50 horrific months.
Drake carefully intertwines an... [read more]
Andrew Benjamin, Towards a Relational Ontology: Philosophy's Other Possibility
reviewed by Joel White
In 1966 Gilles Deleuze wrote a review of a work by the French philosopher Gilbert Simondon. The opening to this review stated that, until now, the principle of individuation had been largely avoided by modern philosophy; that although the accomplishment of physics, of biology and of psychology had relativised and attenuated the concept, individuation had remained, until Simondon, un-interpreted. The purpose of Deleuze’s review was to highlight the force of Simondon’s philosophy, a... [read more]
