Review 31 Home

A Deep Cultural Connection: An Interview with Minoo Dinshaw

by Imogen Woodberry

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]

This is Not Sentimental Verse

by Ed Simon

African-American literature is a literature of syncretism. Critic John Leland writes in Hip: A History that ‘slaves and freedmen worked an early form of verbal jiujitsu, imposing African values about the foreign vocabulary’, and this is abundantly clear in Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassins. If the poem is haunted by the lacunae of the first African-American poets, and if it engages an African aesthetic of signifyin(g), then it also enacts this syncretism, not least of all in the form which Hayes has chosen to write in. Few poetic genres are as ‘Western’ as the sonnet (even if it can be historically traced back to the European periphery as a form used heretical Albigensians during the Middle Ages). The earliest of 13th-century sonnets were written in languages from Sicilian to Provencal, Arabic to Ladino, so that Hayes’ post-modern sonnet sequence drawing from the patterns of Wolof and Yoruba becomes its own continuation of tradition. [read full essay]

Crackle and Prod

Christian Wiman, Survival is a Style: Poems

reviewed by GE Stevens

‘Most criticism is like most poetry; it simply leaves you indifferent’. True, but also not great to bear in mind when beginning a review of a poetry collection by the person who wrote it. It helps enormously that Wiman does not write ‘most’ poetry. He is a poet and prose writer who occupies that mystical section of the Venn diagram where belief crosses over with unbelief, lack with fulfilment, stillness with noise, reverence with cynicism, prayer with first-class bitching. Wiman loves... [read more]

One Little Room An Everywhere

Xavier de Maistre, trans. Andrew Brown, A Journey around My Room

reviewed by James Riding

Emerging from six weeks of isolation in the spring of 1790, deprived of the stimulation of friends and social gatherings, you might assume Xavier de Maistre would be feeling restless, his joie de vivre depleted. Not so. The young aristocrat’s confinement left him exhilarated. In a breathless account, de Maistre wrote how he had undertaken a journey in isolation that had given him a rewarding new way to see the world and led to surprising reflections on his own life and character. ‘My heart... [read more]

A Square of One’s Own

Francesca Wade, Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars

reviewed by Hattie Walters

In December 2019 I found myself in Mecklenburgh Square, at the heart of Bloomsbury in London. I was staying briefly at the Goodenough College – situated in the buildings that form part of the square’s contentious redevelopment after its bombing in World War II, – and while I was keen to visit the Tavistock and Gordon Square stomping grounds of the Bloomsbury Group (those individuals frequently described as having ‘lived in squares . . . and loved in triangles’), it was not until... [read more]

Against Cancer Memoirs

Anne Boyer, The Undying: A Meditation on Modern Illness

reviewed by Liam Harrison

The slogan, ‘Fuck cancer,’ is always the wrong slogan, writes Anne Boyer, ‘because “cancer” is a historically specific, socially constructed imprecision and not an empirically established monolith.’ Fuck Cancer Memoirs might have worked as a far less poetic title for Boyer’s book, The Undying, which is a cancer memoir against cancer memoirs. More accurately, it is a challenge to ‘cancer’s near-criminal myth of singularity,’ addressing the way that any writing about cancer is... [read more]

Above and Beyond Gwyneth Paltrow

Matthew Haigh, Death Magazine

reviewed by Rosanna Hildyard

1. On first glance, you (browsing the Poetry & Drama shelves in Waterstones) might mistake Death Magazine for one of those popular poetry books. You know: the ones that get Goodreads reviews, sell copies, and cause allergic reactions in those who have been reading poetry for more than ten years. The millennial-pink cover of Death Magazine is reminiscent of Amanda Lovelace’s the princess saves herself in this one, or something dairy-based by Rupi Kaur. However, look again, and you might... [read more]

Forsake, forswear, furlough

Gabriel Josipovici, Forgetting

reviewed by Jack Solloway

Who was the third man on the moon? Google it. Where’s the nearest cashpoint? Google it. Our reliance on the internet has turned the search engine into a verb for artificial recall. Whenever memory fails us, we turn to our keyboards and smartphones for answers. One might go so far as to say, with less exaggeration than is comfortable, that we have forgotten what it means to forget. In a new collection of essays, Gabriel Josipovici excels in navigating the murky, Lethe-like waters of... [read more]

Free as Demon-magic

Intan Paramaditha, The Wandering

reviewed by Jessica Lee

In COVID-19 times when space is shrunken, place more grimly partitioned, and mobility throttled, a novel about ‘the highs and lows of global nomadism’ like The Wandering gets an unintended inflation in its surreality quotient. Casual border-crossing is now inherently aberrant, anachronistic even, a practice that will come attendant with curtailment and constraint even as lockdown lifts. Intan Paramaditha’s tongue-in-cheek, magical-realist handling of border-crossing – as a thing only... [read more]

My leavings are never quite in peace

Will Burns, Country Music

reviewed by GE Stevens

Will Burns walks beside you through Country Music, his debut collection. He speaks quietly but with insistence and a language earthed firmly in the Anglo Saxon ‘Bucks country’ through which he roams. On the journey, Burns shares intimate stories of moments underlived, things left unfinished, unsaid. But his poems are not barbed responses to the past — though many, in considering choices made (and therefore those that weren’t) gesture to regret. Instead they carry with them an... [read more]

An Emergency Brake is Becoming the Only Option

Chen Qiufan, trans. Ken Liu, The Waste Tide

reviewed by Calum Barnes

‘What we excrete comes back to consume us,’ Nick Shay remarks pithily in Don DeLillo’s Underworld, one of the pre-eminent texts of waste literature. Nuclear waste is the ‘underhistory’ of the American 20th century. Waste Tide, the recently translated first novel of Chen Qiufan, is the underhistory of ‘The Chinese Century’ and 21st-century capital: the disposal of electronic waste and consumer technologies. Chen Qiufan belongs to a new generation of Chinese science fiction... [read more]

A World Beyond Space and Time

Elsa Court, The American Roadside in Émigré Literature, Film and Photography, 1955-1985

reviewed by Neil Archer

While ‘the road’ has long been recognised as an important motif in American culture, from the Beats to the Hollywood road movie, those places along or between the highways – the gas stations, roadside diners and motels – have not always had the critical attention they deserve. This is the argument at the heart of Elsa Court’s engaging and illuminating study. Taking us through case studies of key works across literature and the visual arts – Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, Robert... [read more]