Reviewed: Zadie Smith, Intimations, Penguin Zadie Smith: ‘My preoccupation when I was young was death. It remains death.’ Interviewer: ‘God, why?’ Zadie Smith: ‘People always say that as if it’s not the only thing that’s going to happen to you.’ —The Touré Show, February 2018 I called the bookshop to pre-order Intimations in May 2020 as one lockdown followed another, and the global death toll continued to rise. In the United States, another murder of ...
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Reviewed: Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through, Virago I started reading Sigrid Nunez’s latest book, What Are You Going Through, two weeks after having spent five days in the neurology ward at Monash Hospital, sharing the room with two women in their fifties who had been diagnosed with cancer. One of them, a thin woman with short grey hair whose name I didn’t write down in my journal, had a spinal tumour removed and ...
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Reviewed: Thresholes, Lara Mimosa Montes, Coffee House Press ‘And, inside the curves, also love.’ —Lara Mimosa Montes, Thresholes ‘But what is grief, if not love persevering?’ —The Vision, WandaVision I know I wasn’t the only person to cry when the second quote above was spoken on the Marvel television show WandaVision. In the scene, another character, Wanda, is watching a sitcom after the death of her brother, Pietro. The Vision is sitting beside Wanda attempting ...
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Reviewed: Royce Kurmelovs, Just Money: Misadventures in the Great Australian Debt Trap, University of Queensland Press, 2020 When the Latin American nations of the 1820s became independent of Spanish rule, they did so largely financed by money borrowed from British bankers. In the same decade, Greece borrowed extensively from the banks of Britain, France and Russia, in part to finance its own struggle for independence from the Ottoman Empire (which those banks also financed). The ...
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Reviewed: Adam Mars-Jones, Box Hill: A Story of Low Self-esteem, Scribe, 2020 Box Hill is one of those tricky books: it disarms you with the candour of its narrator and the apparent simplicity of his story, and then unsettles you the further you reflect on it. It’s mischievous in that way. Its recollection of a kinky coming-of-age that kicks off in 1975 at Box Hill, 30 kilometres south-west of London, is tender and elegiac. Colin, ...
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Reviewed: Kylie Maslen, Show Me Where It Hurts: Living with Invisible Illness, Text, 2020 One of the supreme, and indeed painful, ironies of pain is that it is so very hard to communicate, yet it always demands to be given voice. Not only as involuntary cry or anguished moan, but in visceral metaphor, as ‘knife’ or ‘burning’, or in memoir or narrative accounts that seek to ‘flesh out’ this terribly isolating state of being. These ...
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Reviewed: Susanna Clarke, Piranesi, Bloomsbury, 2020 It’s been 16 years since English novelist Susanna Clarke’s hit debut, the genre-busting doorstopper Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Evoking the voices of Austen and Chesterton, Clarke constructed a Regency-era Britain simmering with prophecies, wizardly rivalries, terrible curses and faerie balls—transforming the fantastical into something mundane, textured, lived-in. But it isn’t Clarke’s meticulous world-building that has stayed with me. What lingers is her canny understanding of human nature: the ...
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Reviewed: Yanyi, The Year of Blue Water, Yale University Press, 2019 Lately I have been considering the political and personal importance of the emotional record. The compulsion to remain unmoved in the face of cruelty, I think, is a danger that has emerged (or perhaps endured) during this year of unrelenting emergencies. Stoicism has become a habit that is prioritised and encouraged by the nation-state so that it may continue to commit acts of cruelty ...
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