As its title suggests, a running theme in Adrenaline is Ibrahimovic’s psychological dependence on excitement, along with his fear of not being able to access this once his playing career concludes. It is certainly tempting to read this book as a high-wire act designed to thrill its author, teetering over terminal opprobrium, just as much as its reader. There is little piety in the book, and very little self-pity: none of its cast is a saint or a monster, just a good laugh or a prick, usually some combination of the two. [read full essay]
The key to Karen Joy Fowler’s Booth, a biofictional novel about Lincoln’s assassin John Wilkes Booth and his wild, sprawling family, is buried in the author’s notes at the end of the book: ‘I began thinking about this book during one of our American spates of horrific mass shootings.’ She doesn’t say which shootings. This was before the Trump administration (more on that later). Perhaps the Pulse nightclub attack in Orlando? Or San Bernadino? [read full essay]
‘I am turning toward a kind of aesthetic mysticism,’ wrote Flaubert in one of his letters. ‘When there is no encouragement to be derived from one’s fellows, when the exterior world is disgusting, enervating, corruptive, and brutalizing, honest and sensitive people are forced to seek somewhere within themselves a more suitable place to live.’ Nobody would say anything like that today; it would be too embarrassing. Treating art as a substitute religion — as something absolute that transcends a debased world and is pursued for its own sake, in a spirit of ascetic renunciation — is no longer fashionable. [read full essay]
Strangers I Know, a book about Durastanti’s family history and upbringing between Brooklyn and a small village in the south of Italy, starts off as an autobiography — or, rather, as a reflection on autobiography as a literary form itself — to transform into a shape-shifting text where the work on form and language is an ongoing, deliberate effort. Perhaps precisely because it is from a linguistic rupture that the author’s memories (and this book) originate: being born to deaf parents whilst also having to straddle two languages and places of origin. [read full essay]
Disaffected young men of the Westworld have begun to believe that everything is loaded against them. Their self-respect has been stolen from them, they believe, by women who won't look twice at them. Their innate physical strength and their yearning to take on leadership roles are redundant attributes, while the breakdown of all their relationships is invariably blamed on them. They have willingly become what they never imagined being — permanent victims. [read full essay]
What does it mean to connect with someone? What does it mean to see yourself in someone else? Is the former even possible without the latter? It’s potentially a solipsistic way of looking at the world, but then, what’s the alternative? A self-conscious and reflexive engagement with experiences that are ostensibly not our own? That feels worse because it is, to my mind, ultimately inauthentic. It means you’re interested because you ought to be, not because you genuinely are. Understanding and empathy become a moral imperative, not something instinctive, intuitive. [read full essay]
Neuroscience so confidently identifies consciousness with the cerebral cortex — the densely-folded, outer layer of grey matter in mammal brains — that surgeons sometimes question whether children born without one require anaesthetics at all. Yet these children cry, laugh, play, and distinguish familiar from unfamiliar stimuli — behaviours difficult to imagine alongside the total absence of experience. Animals whose cortex has been surgically removed continue to navigate mazes, eat, procreate, and nurse their young; if anything they are more active, and more emotional, than their normal peers. [read full essay]
Today, taking public transport often feels like taking a calculated risk. A risk that is continuing to shut many people living with disabilities or health conditions out of swathes of public life. The windows of Glasgow’s buses have little stickers on them declaring that, in order to allow for proper ventilation on the bus, they do not close fully. Glasgow’s passengers have proven these stickers wrong. Over the months, perhaps because of the cold or a lack of conviction in the importance of ventilation to prevent transmission of COVID-19, many of these windows have been forced closed. If I am feeling brave, I pull the windows open. Sometimes others close them. [read full essay]
Our end-of-year selection features two debuts: Sarvat Hasin’s contemporary retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, which is praised for its ‘propulsive energy and a refreshing lack of linguistic reserve’; and Egyptian-American poet Moheb Soliman’s collection of poems on the theme of place and belonging. There are also more familiar names including Cynthia Ozick and Gwendoline Riley, whose ‘genius’ novel My Phantoms was criminally overlooked for the Booker. Other choices include George Saunders’ ‘warm and vivacious’ Russian literature primer, Frank Wynne’s ‘absolutely essential’ collection of LGBTQ writing, translator Polly Barton’s ‘thoughtful and erudite’ essay-memoir about language and culture, and Charles Boyle’s The Other Jack — ‘a book about what we talk about when we talk about books.' [read full essay]
The historian Barbara Rosenwein is the latest to wonder whether a typology of the myths of love might be teased out of the centuries-long obsession with its elusive ideal. She distinguishes five of these: the miraculous kinship that unites soulmates; the transcendent rapture of the besotted state; selfless devotion to the loved one; ineradicable yearning that feeds on itself; and the blinkered carnal rampancy of the sex appetite. For all that its elements have propagated into five, there is an unmistakable hint here of Plato's triune definition of the soul, descending from the noble ideals housed in the head to the spirited adventures of the heart, and thence to the importunate hungers of the nether regions — the belly and genitals, their lust for possession. [read full essay]