When Notre-Dame started burning, I knew about it within four minutes. But when the Yellow Vest riots started, I wasn’t aware of it for ten days. As videos of the protests eventually emerged on my Facebook news feed, I was confused: I assumed they were old clips or even fakes. None of my Parisian friends had mentioned the situation, so how could it really be happening in their neighbourhoods? Upon discussing it with other London French expats, they turned out to share my confusion: they had no idea anything amiss had been going on, as no one in their networks had brought it up either. There were riots in the streets of Paris, and Parisians didn’t seem to care. [read full essay]
There's a striking absence of prominent working-class voices in the British media, especially those belonging to the younger generation. And there is a gross underrepresentation of working-class characters in films, TV shows and literature: a 2014 LSE survey of creative industries found that only 10% of authors, writers and translators come from backgrounds typically associated with the working-classes, whilst in the category of visual media (including TV and film) for directors, arts officers and producers the figure is as low as 3%. Certainly there are anomalies (Sally Rooney's Normal People and Francis Lee's God's Own Country being two striking examples) but the general picture is undoubtedly bleak. And yet, there’s little public outcry. If you are poor and British, the likelihood is you feel under-represented and that no-one gives a shit. And while the left have been happy to tolerate this, the right have been able to take advantage by making a series of jingoistic appeals, the undercurrent of which is: if they won't fight your corner, we will. [read full essay]
Motherhood is the space of impossible choices, the space of incommensurable care. It is no wonder that the political stakes of thinking motherhood are so high and that the literary and historical forms that it engenders are fragmentary, historical, ahistorical, messy, philosophical, utopian, capacious and careful (none of these impulses should be seen as incompatible or contradictory – motherhood is the space of contradictory feelings). Writing about motherhood at this particular juncture of financial austerity, political turmoil, hard borders and imminent climate disaster is a reminder of the ways in which social reproduction is being intensified in unsustainable ways in the present. It should also be seen as part of a desire to denaturalise female generosity, to acknowledge pregnancy not as an inevitable stage of female identity. [read full essay]
Amid the aftershocks of another monumental reordering of the world with digital technologies, revisiting nature through walking and reading can be a way of reconstructing perception, and reimagining the self through observation and imagination. Three books: Out of the Woods by Luke Turner, Mothlight by Adam Scovell and Lanny by Max Porter, all explore this organic catalyst for reflection. They offer a new type of dérive through looking closely at what is at hand at a moment when skewing typical modes of perambulation around a city or place conjures images of cars veering onto footpaths. Each of the three books also delivers a different perception of the quintessential British walk and uncovers some of its complex and illusive meaning. [read full essay]
Terrance Hayes likes to describe his background as ‘very American’. His mother, who works as a prison guard, had him when she was 16. He grew up in South Carolina, before attending Coker College on a basketball scholarship. It was there that he started writing poems. In 2014 he was awarded a McArthur Fellowship and in 2018 he was shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize. I was able to meet Hayes when he was promoting his book American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, a keenly insistent sequence penned in the news-scream fever-dream which followed the 2016 American election. We chatted in the corridor of his hotel, while he ate a croissant. In this book’s examination of America and its many assassins, Hayes’s modus operandi is to be unrelenting in his ‘posing of poets’ questions to history’; we discuss some of them here. [read full interview]
In his 2009 book, Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher points to Franz Kafka as the most illuminating writer on the neoliberal style. The Trial, he argues, is the perfect representation of post-Fordian bureaucracy, where Josef K's quest to reach ultimate authority and solve the mystery of his arrest is an endless endeavour of delays and postponements. ‘The big Other,’ Fisher writes, meaning the authority figure with the answers K craves, ‘cannot be encountered in itself: there are only officials [. . .] engaged in acts of interpretation about what the big Other's intentions. And these acts of interpretation, these deferrals of responsibility, are all that the big Other is.’ [read full essay]
In Marshall I saw my shadow self. In Mike Davis I recognised my angrier part, the undertow that tugged with my Marshall part, the loving part. These were the two souls dwelling in my breast, dwelling in my feeling and thinking about cities as well. I was more dystopian than utopian. Funnily enough, this is what I wanted to discuss with Marshall, who’d become a friend. We’d agreed to see each other, to talk about a letter he’d sent me about an article I’d sent him. [read full essay]
In Heidegger's view, what was happening to the Jews in the 1930s was not so much the administratively planned extermination of a people, but more their historically determined self-destruction, for which they had only themselves to blame. 'When what is essentially “Jewish” in the metaphysical sense fights against what is Jewish, the high point of self-annihilation [Selbstvernichtung] in history has been reached; assuming that the “Jewish” has everywhere completely seized mastery, so that even the fight against “the Jewish”, and it above all, falls under its sway.' That said, the struggle for supremacy had been anything but a level playing-field. At the end of the decade covered by the first period of the Notebooks, while the war in Nazi-occupied Europe was still raging, Heidegger offered this lament: 'The Judaism of the world, spurred on by those who were allowed to emigrate from Germany, is intangible everywhere and does not need to engage in warlike acts in spite of their display of power, whereas we [Germans] are left to sacrifice the best blood of the best of our nation.' [read full essay]
Told with light-hearted élan yet contained in a magisterial mould, Minoo Dinshaw’s Outlandish Knight charts the life of Steven Runciman (1903 - 2000), a figure who was both a chronicler of the past – as a renowned historian of the Byzantine Empire – and a witness to the age in which he lived. A schoolfriend of George Orwell and an early love interest of Cecil Beaton, he partied with the Bloomsbury set as well as with royalty. To read this biography is not simply to learn about Runciman’s life but to step back into it: through the dashing, ludic style which saw him shortlisted for The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, Dinshaw expertly captures the essence of his subject. In a coffee shop in Hammersmith we chatted about Runciman and also discussed Dinshaw’s next project, a book about the interlocking lives of two political moderates during the English Civil War. [read full interview]
The titles chosen as Review 31’s Books of the Year are a diverse bunch, reflecting our contributors’ varied literary tastes. Their recommendations include three translated works: the ‘dreamlike, shape-shifting territories’ of Maria Gabriela Llansol’s Geography of Rebels Trilogy; Caterina Pascual Söderbaum’s literary memoir of family trauma, The Oblique Place, and a comprehensive and ‘dizzying’ new Spanish-language edition of Roberto Bolaño’s collected stories. Our selection also features Sulaiman Addonia’s ‘timely and fierce novel about survival, conflict and immigration’, Silence is My Mother Tongue; Will Eaves’ powerful and stylish Murmur; the ‘light but forceful prose’ of Sally Rooney’s Normal People; a comic novel in the shape of Rob Palk’s Animal Lovers; and Amy McCauley’s ‘ferociously good, brilliantly original’ poetry collection, Oedipa. [read full essay]
