In 2004 the novelist Helen DeWitt met Ilya Gridneff, a 24-year-old tabloid journalist in an ‘organic-pub’ in Hackney. A playful dispute about Adorno led to an extensive email correspondence, culminating in Your Name Here, a 600-page metafictional novel made up of emails, unfinished manuscripts, a frame narrative inspired by Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, intermittent attempts to teach the reader Arabic, and much else besides. Your Name Here was finally published by Deep Vellum last year. Ilya, now the Financial Times correspondent for Canada, fielded my questions about the book via email and Zoom. We spoke about reader-friendliness, Plato’s Cave, t/here slippage, the Iraq War and Sir Mix-a-Lot. [read full interview]
There’s a moment near the beginning of Federico Falco’s The Plains where the narrator, tired after a day of digging and planting his garden, has a rest. It’s January, near Zapiola in Buenos Aires province, on the pampas — the vast, flat grassland that spreads in a shallow half-moon from the coasts of Argentina and Uruguay into the South American continent. The narrator relishes the inactivity: ‘the pleasure of not doing anything, semidarkness at siesta hour, reclining to read on the floor, bare back against cold tiles’. [read full essay]
Mercedes Halfon, trans. Rahul Bery, Outsider Everywhere: Witold Gombrowicz in Argentina
reviewed by Simon Firth
‘Kill Borges!’ Witold Gombrowicz allegedly shouts from aboard the ship carrying him out of Buenos Aires in 1963, 24 years after he’d first arrived as a passenger on a Polish cruise liner. When war broke out in 1939 and the ship was recalled, he decided, on impulse, to stay. He was thirty-five, with two suitcases, two hundred dollars, and two published books behind him – including Ferdydurke, the comic, surrealist novel about a writer abducted by his old schoolteacher, which had... [read more]
Certain scenes and visions recur through Joe Carrick-Varty's poetry. There are picnics and swims, near-photographic depictions of fields and skies. These could be the elemental building materials of a conventional poetics, summer days and the natural world. Those days and that world are here, but they are catastrophically overshadowed by the internalised experiences of domestic violence, his father's alcoholism, and the haunting tragedy of the untimely death of a friend. Carrick-Varty's writing... [read more]
Antoine Volodine, trans. Alyson Waters, The Monroe Girls
reviewed by Katherine Williams
Antoine Volodine’s The Monroe Girls begins on two streets. One is avenue Chouïgo, easily located on a map, and which one can see from the windows of a psychiatric institution where the initial portion of the novel unravels. The other is rue Dellwo, Chouïgo’s negative of sorts — invisible on all standard maps, manifest only with the assistance of rarefied telepathic vision and, if necessary, an outfit of advanced optical equipment.
Volodine’s schizophrenic narrator, who oscillates... [read more]
In 2016, Amitav Ghosh posed the question ‘What is it about climate change that the mention of it should lead to banishment from the preserves of serious fiction?’. A decade on, Richard Powers’ longlisted Booker Prize Bewilderment (2021) and Stephen Markley’s The Deluge (2023), as well as university syllabi dedicated solely to climate-change fiction and the recent inauguration of the Climate Fiction Prize, show that ‘cli-fi’, if nothing else, is flourishing. Tara Menon’s debut... [read more]
A new Gwendoline Riley novel might strike a sort of fantastic fear into the heart — may we never be so precisely perceived! Her observation of the minutiae of (awkward, solipsistic, desperate) human behaviour makes her characters painfully real, all their idiosyncrasy and damage laid bare. Characters perform banalities and clichés, struggle to hide their weaknesses whilst hopelessly revealing them, repeat their peculiar gestures and habits.
The foil to the more flamboyant of these... [read more]
One of my friends likes to pose the same question. In which artistic medium, he asks, are we seeing the most radical experimentation of form right now? His own answer is always the same: video games. ‘Sure,’ I say. ‘But it’s easier to push the boundaries in such a young field.’ Depending on how you periodise the history of the modern novel — most academics agree that it begins with Cervantes’s Don Quixote in the early 17th century, others trace the form to the third or fourth... [read more]
If you were to outline a Waidnerian aesthetic, on the strength of their last four books, it might go like this: a fearless cannibalism of existing texts, TV shows, animated films, novels, you name it; what Waidner themself identified in 2019 as a ‘disidentificatory’ practice vis à vis the existing canon of avant-garde literature; a thoroughgoing engagement with the actual class and racial politics of this grim little island, rather than the ones we tell ourselves we have; slightly... [read more]
Helen Vendler’s Inhabit the Poem: Last Essays is an eloquent, humane work of criticism, which displays her typical sensitivity to what Wordsworth called the ‘turnings intricate of verse’. I must admit, I am not an unbiased reviewer. Having been born several decades after Vendler, I came to her work rather late. She, in my (inaccurate) imagination, had always been the empress of poetic criticism, duly enthroned at Harvard. Though some of her early works received severe criticism, Gordon... [read more]
Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It
reviewed by Christopher Webb
'It's not just you', Cory Doctorow assures us in his much-anticipated new work, Enshittification, 'the internet is getting worse, fast'. The deliberately vulgar neologism and title of his latest book went viral after he first coined it in 2022 (it's since been used widely across social media, quoted in newspaper articles and magazines and, in 2023, it was the American Dialect Society's word of the year). But, as Doctorow insists, 'enshittification isn't just a way to say "Something got worse".... [read more]
Definitions of the word discord normally offer two meanings: the first, a general one that describes a difference or clash of opinions; the second, more specific, names a tension or clash between musical notes. In both, discord sits in assumed opposition to harmony, defined as agreement, be that between people or notes: harmony, good; discord, bad.
Within music, though, the terms meaning is not as simple as dictionary definitions suggest. Most music makes some use of discord to build... [read more]
