Review 31

False Starts and Misadventures: An Interview with Ilya Gridneff

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.

‘What I Have Lived Through Cannot be Endured’: An Interview with Wasim Said

Like the works of Primo Levi, or Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich, Witness to the Hellfire of Genocide is destined to become synonymous with its subject. In this case, the subject is the ongoing genocide in Gaza, and the author is 24-year-old Wasim Said. ‘I write it [this book] so I can hang these words around your neck,’ Said writes in the opening pages, ‘to make you bear the responsibility of knowing, the responsibility of being a witness.’ The book is a thoroughly unsparing account of the genocide, detailing just some of the unimaginable horrors every Gazans has had to live with since October 7 2023.

‘Austen Is Film, Trollope Is Television’: A Conversation with Whit Stillman

Stillman’s work invites literary comparisons: an avowed Austenite, he cites a constellation of authors as influences. The literary lineage of his films was among a range of topics that we discussed as he carried out a tour of five British cinemas — exhibiting rare 35mm prints of two of his best-loved features. The Whit Stillman Tour, in association with Lost Reels, continues with screenings of Metropolitan at the Filmhouse, Edinburgh (25 July) and the Ultimate Picture Palace, Oxford (31 July).

‘Hang in there, boy!’ (Outsider Everywhere: Witold Gombrowicz in Argentina)

Mercedes Halfon, trans. Rahul Bery 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...

Lethal Candour (Before Violence)

Joe Carrick-Varty reviewed by Stuart Walton: 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...

How Pitiful and Pleasurable (The Monroe Girls)

Antoine Volodine, trans. Alyson Waters 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...

Between Disasters (Under Water)

Tara Menon reviewed by Matilda Sykes: 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...

Cruel to be Kind (The Palm House)

Gwendoline Riley reviewed by Martha Sprackland: 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...

The Novel is a Laboratory (Transcription)

Ben Lerner reviewed by Nick Bartlett: 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...

Role Play (As If)

Isabel Waidner reviewed by Victoria Mangan: 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...

Transfusions of Melody, Infusions of Light (Inhabit the Poem: Last Essays)

Helen Vendler reviewed by Bret van den Brink: 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...

End-stage Rot (Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It)

Cory Doctorow 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"....

A Longer, Deeper Look (Discord)

Jeremy Cooper reviewed by Thomas Chadwick: 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...

What might be, could have been, or is not (Aerth)

Deborah Tomkins reviewed by Hugh Foley: Deborah Tomkins’ novella, Aerth, starts as it means to go on, in the set of moods grammarians call irrealis — the ways we talk about things that only might happen, such as the conditional, or subjunctive. ‘Had Magnus of Arden stayed home, enjoyed his party, blown out the seven candles on his cake, he would not now be sitting at the top of an oak tree, quietly observing like an explorer.’ The sense of self-cancelling possibility here, neither the real nor the unreal prevailing, is...

In All Its Smallness (The Kingdom)

Yoel Noorali reviewed by John Rattray: One of the stories in The Kingdom, Yoel Noorali’s debut collection, is about a writer who can’t read. He has produced nine novels, one of them a Nobel Prize winner, by ‘typing randomly, with the letters happening to fall into celebrated sequences of words’. He envies his reviewers and is puzzled by their admiration because the ‘pleasure and wisdom’ they appear to find in his books is beyond him. His 12-year-old nephew, Ben, reads excerpts of their praise, each a perfect parody of...

More Acute Agony (Letters to Eugène: Correspondence 1977–1987)

Hervé Guibert and Eugène Savitzkaya, trans. Christine Pichini reviewed by Rachel Dastgir: The Belgian poet Eugène Savitzkaya was 28 and living in Liège when he was drawn into an unexpected correspondence with a then 22-year-old Hervé Guibert. Guibert had published his first novel La Mort propagande in 1977, an astonishing debut and autofictional novel that described Guibert’s explosive and fragmentary encounters with both death and burgeoning sexuality, and was celebrated by fellow writers including Monique Wittig, Roland Barthes, and Michel Foucault. He was exciting and...

The End of the Good Story (Dog Days)

Emily LaBarge reviewed by Julia Merican: ‘I remember everything,’ Emily LaBarge writes early on in Dog Days, her coruscating debut that is as much about writing as it is about trauma, grief, and the talismans of catharsis. ‘I live by this memory,’ she continues, ‘it forms such a core of my person, what I am able to write, what catches my attention, until all of a sudden there are some things I can’t remember at all.’ What happens when our memory of a certain event, ‘on the twenty-second day of December, 2009, at...

Making Space (The Feminist Art of Walking)

Morag Rose reviewed by Kate Bugos: On the first Sunday of every month, academic and activist Morag Rose can be found walking, wandering, meandering, shuffling, or best of all loitering, down the streets of Manchester with like-minded loiterers of all sorts. Their walks — which have been taking place for 20 years – are guided and not-guided by different games, instructions, motivations, or lack thereof, with an ever-changing group of companions. Each experience of this collective loitering is ephemeral and unique. Rose,...

Scope Creep (The Expansion Project)

Ben Pester reviewed by Robert Kiely: Tom Crowley brings his daughter to Bring Your Daughter to Work Day, and she goes missing. But all is not as it seems. Each chapter is a monologue, either by Tom Crowley or someone who works with him, such as Kath Corbett, Steve the receptionist, an unnamed Liaison Officer, an unnamed AV technician, and finally an unnamed archivist who is assembling all the material we are reading. Tom Crowley is an angry and frustrated man — we get subtle hints of this when he’s at a train station and...

The Microcosmology of the Senses (A Different Story)

Amlanjyoti Goswami reviewed by Frith Taylor: Amlanjyoti Goswami’s latest collection A Different Story returns to themes explored in previous work, which I think might be best described as a kind of secular spirituality. Meditations on the beauty of Delhi and the importance of poetry itself are conduits for deep feeling through which the speaker expresses a wish for connection. I have previously suggested that Goswami’s work is concerned with sincerity, but A Different Story clarifies his poetic vision, which I would argue becomes...

At the Desk (The Writer’s Room: The Hidden Worlds That Shape the Books We Love)

Katie da Cunha Lewin reviewed by Helena C. Aeberli: For the past few years I have been working at the exact same desk in my university library. Every morning I show up at 9am to claim my spot, glaring at any interlopers who so much as glance its way. I unpack my necessary detritus — notebook, KeepCup, grubby sticker-clad laptop — and settle down to work. The desk is university property, but to all intents and purposes, between 9 and 5 on the weekdays, it belongs to me. Friends know exactly where to find me if they need to borrow a charger or...

‘Some of what we did became a thing' (Amateurs! How We Built the Internet and Why It Matters )

Joanna Walsh reviewed by Christopher Webb: Right now, it’s difficult to know how — or indeed if — the internet will ever recover from the many skirmishes it’s fighting on various fronts (the ramping up of government regulation in certain states, the 'enshittification' of private platforms and, perhaps most significantly, the attempts by the AI labs to divert all traffic away from traditional publishers and websites and towards their new platforms). How did we get here? How did a medium that once promised to democratise...

The Ground Beneath Our Feet (Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization)

Richard Seymour reviewed by Tymek Woodham: The ever-widening gyre of late capitalism requires, in British-American academic David Harvey’s phrase, a fix. The rampant accumulation of wealth constantly threatens to expend itself through the production of self-made crises: the market’s invisible hand has trembled since birth. And just as capitalism seeks ‘spatial fixes’ in the form of national banks, supranational economic zones or temporary forms of fixed capital that ensure the auto-destructive mechanisms of accumulation do not...

Truth Bombing (Loren Ipsum)

Andrew Gallix reviewed by Oscar Mardell: Loren Ipsum is a number of extraordinary things: the daughter of a high-flying architect and a renowned landscape gardener, an alumna of the University of Oxford, a former model, a beloved children’s author, and even a bestselling novelist. Now she is a literary journalist to boot – a writer, that is, who writes about writers and writing (and whose work seems to feature exclusively in publications with names ending in ‘Review of Books’). She is, then, almost a fantasy or parody version...