In recent years, fans of Vladimir Nabokov have been treated to a steady supply of treasures dug out from the fabled Montreux vault. The unfinished and lavishly produced The Original of Laura (Penguin, 2009), complete with perforated facsimile index cards for the Nabophile to rearrange at will, was greeted with much fanfare from the popular press and ivory tower alike. However, despite the critics’ ardent wrestling with its relative literary value, few could claim Laura to be a masterpiece in... [read more]
The latest book of Verso's 'Pocket Communism' series sees Jodi Dean attempt to deliver a lesson to the political left that the political right already learned long ago: that 'Communism' is the horizon that configures our political landscape. For the right, the communist threat is everywhere. Barack Obama is communist, single payer healthcare is communist, anti-war protest is communist, the regulation of markets is communist, taxing the rich is communist. Superficially of course this invective... [read more]
Junot Díaz is not a prolific author - he's only written three works in the past 16 years. He is, however, a successful one: his Pulitzer Prize, recent MacArthur ‘genius’ grant, PEN/Malamud Award and National Book Critics Circle Award can attest to that. His most recent collection of stories, This Is How You Lose Her, has much in common with his two previous books and, if anything, manages to better them at their own game.
Just as in Drown (Riverhead, 1996) and The Brief Wondrous Life of... [read more]
Sebastian Faulks, A Possible Life: A Novel in Five Parts
reviewed by Francis Hutton-Williams
Sebastian Faulks has said that his latest novel is written in the style of a five-part symphony, and there is room for both triumph and failure in the way that the parts never add up. A Possible Life abandons the unities of time and place in favour of a wandering depiction of what it is to be human. Though the five ‘movements’ of the book are clearly distinct, certain objects are allowed to cut across them like distant motifs - these include a chipped, plastered and repainted Madonna; a... [read more]
Neal Curtis, Idiotism: Capitalism and the Privatisation of Life
reviewed by Stuart Walton
One of global capitalism's subtlest achievements has been to convince its client populations throughout the developed and developing worlds that it has made available to them a potentially limitless field of social, economic and cultural opportunity. In opposition to the monolithic state communism of the former eastern bloc, but also against the misguided strictures of social democracy in its self-defeating obsession with welfarism and redistributive taxation, the global market frees each... [read more]
Lightning Rods is deft, dedicated satire of Swiftian proportion, so convincingly written in a faux-relatable, business pitch style that I flinched upon reading it. I needed, for the first little while, to remind myself precisely what DeWitt was pulling off – the magnitude of the ludicrous parody she was constructing. It was that or pulling at my cheeks in anxious resistance to the big sell.
The story is simple: a failing vacuum cleaner salesman, Joe, inspired by a long-running sexual... [read more]
Franco 'Bifo' Berardi, The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance
reviewed by Daniel Hartley
Let us imagine three rooms, each one sealed off from the others and furnished with a single desk, a keyboard and a computer screen. In the first room sit Deleuze and Guattari, in the second TS Eliot, and in the third FR Leavis. The computer system into which they type is designed to cut and paste extracts from all four thinkers, to superimpose some passages on others, and to create an overall palimpsest of their work. The final product, I claim, would be something akin to Franco ‘Bifo’... [read more]
Niall Ferguson, The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die
reviewed by Houman Barekat
Bringing together a series of talks given for BBC Radio’s prestigious Reith Lectures, The Great Degeneration is a plain-speaking rallying cry from one of Britain’s most high-profile public intellectuals, urging a return to the first principles of liberal political economy. The relative success of the West, Niall Ferguson explains, has hitherto been attributable to the efficacy and dynamism of its ‘good institutions’; by contrast, countries afflicted by economic underdevelopment,... [read more]
Donny Gluckstein, The Nazis, Capitalism and the Working Class
reviewed by Tom Steele
How did it come about that during the 1930s the world’s most advanced and politically well-organised working class so quickly succumbed to Nazism? By the late 19th century the German working class had developed a Social Democratic Party (SPD) of considerable authority and a strong trade union organisation. It was complemented by a notable workers’ educational arm, led by Wilhelm Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, which added to the liberal German tradition of Bildung a strong Marxist... [read more]
Passing some time before a mis-scheduled appointment at St Bartholomew's hospital in Smithfield, I visited the plaque hanging in the attached museum. 'You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive’, runs the bronze-embossed motto, commemorating the first words spoken on this site over a century ago by the consulting detective Sherlock Holmes, to his soon-to-be chronicler Dr John Watson MD. Enquiries reveal the plaque's position to be misleading: the meeting took place not here but up some stairs... [read more]
