Adam Shatz, Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination
reviewed by Gabriel Flynn
The title of Adam Shatz’s new essay collection, Writers and Missionaries, alludes to a remark by the novelist V. S. Naipaul during an interview with Shatz: ‘Ultimately you have to make a choice — are you a writer, or are you a missionary?’ Although Shatz finds Naipaul’s distinction too crude, he agrees there is a tension between the writer, ‘who describes things as he or she sees them,’ and the missionary, ‘who describes things as he or she wishes they might be under the... [read more]
Dorothee Elmiger, trans. Megan Ewing, Out of the Sugar Factory
reviewed by Jim Henderson
Dorothee Elmiger’s Out of the Sugar Factory is classified as fiction, but halfway through it, the narrator, an author at work on a book that seems to be Out of the Sugar Factory itself, tells her editor that what she’s writing is a ‘research report’, not a novel. Argufying over categorisations only gets you so far in coming to grips with a book like this, but her description isn’t wrong. The plot of Out of the Sugar Factory consists of this narrator, whose life tracks with the... [read more]
What I remember is the camomile, the ‘plash’ of the water, the ‘shameless beauty’ of the sycamore trees. These are some of the visual fragments from the opening pages of Beloved, Toni Morrison’s commemorative love song to the ‘sixty million and more’ Africans and African Americans who suffered, endured and fought the horrors of slavery. They are not my memories nor are they exactly Morrison’s, but those of her main character, the other beloved of the text, Sethe, whose mind... [read more]
In the documentary Psychiatry and Violence, R.D. Laing exposes the limitations of paranoia as a symptom of mental illness through his inversion of its rationale, asking, ‘What do we make of people who do not realise that they’re persecuted when they are? We haven’t even got a word for that.’ American author Tao Lin is seeking to a provide just such a vocabulary and has diagnosed us with whatever that word is.
Lin’s latest metonymic protagonist is Li, an author known for his... [read more]
Laurent Mauvignier, trans. Daniel Levin Becker, The Birthday Party
reviewed by Lucy Thynne
Of his need to write, the reclusive Australian writer Gerald Murnane is direct. The compulsion is not always there, he says, but ‘time and again the need has come back — the need to put into words some complex pattern of feelings and imagery. They comprise my Holy Trinity: images, feelings, words. Those three are the basic components of my universe, the sub-atomic particles of all that matters — images, feelings, words.’ Reading Laurent Mauvignier’s latest novel, The Birthday Party,... [read more]
Nicholas Royle’s Manchester Uncanny tells us more about people than places. What makes this short story collection most interesting are its unreliable, humdrum narrators and eerie changes of perspective, reflecting the historical-urban splice of the city behind them. The collection contains three new stories along with a compilation of previously published work. Though a few stories do not fit in as well, a general malaise pervades the work as a whole.
Royle’s narrators are usually men,... [read more]
Kyle Smith, Cult of the Dead: A Brief History of Christianity
reviewed by Josh Mcloughlin
Jesus told his disciples: ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it and those who lose their life for my sake will find it’ (Matthew 16:24–25). The opening gambit of Christianity is a death pact. Believers in return for giving up their earthly life for Jesus — and for the first Christians, that often meant a grisly death — were promised eternal life in the next. Suffer now,... [read more]
James Wilt, Drinking Up the Revolution: How to Smash Big Alcohol and Reclaim Working-Class Joy
reviewed by Sam Gregory
In my local in Sheffield, where I’ve lived for 13 years, there’s a tradition whereby anyone who goes on a demonstration can bring their placards to the pub afterwards and hang them on the wall for semi-permanent display. The pub is also a vital hub in the city for hosting political meetings and planning strikes and direct actions — such is the link between a particular strand of British drinking culture and working class politics.
But Canadian writer James Wilt’s new book, Drinking... [read more]
Leonard Cohen, A Ballet of Lepers: A Novel and Stories
reviewed by Stuart Walton
'A man has to discover his own responsibilities,' states the narrator of 'Ceremonies', one of the short stories in this posthumous collection of Leonard Cohen's early prose. 'They aren't necessarily the ones he inherits.' It is a measure of the significance of the mature work of a writer that one looks for the premonitory traces of distinction in their earliest, as though the later production gained in stature through being a consummation of the nascent promise. If there is a clear line of... [read more]
I typically approach a posthumous book of poems with a mixture of excitement and trepidation, especially if it’s by a poet whose work I have long admired. On the one hand, it’s great to get the chance to hear a final statement from an important voice. On the other, the conditions of the production of a posthumous book are often complicated, with semi-finished work jockeying for inclusion with more polished pieces, and with no author around to issue a definitive judgement on what belongs or... [read more]
