Lynne Tillman’s latest book, Mothercare, is a call to examine the deep complexities that caring in all its forms — medical, social, private, domiciliary, familial — involves. It is a plea to look directly at the suffering of all who are part of this cared-for-carer relationship: the ill or disabled individual, the family, the precariously placed private caregivers and companions, the doctors and nurses, the surrounding friends. And it is an honest exposition and exploration of how racialised, gendered and classed the labour of care-work is and continues to be. [read full essay]
It is telling that Yellowface, R. F. Kuang’s satirical swipe at the politics of racial impersonation, begins at Yale. In recent years, elite American universities been the site of a spate of scandals in which a prominent figure is revealed to have declared a racial identity to which they can stake no viable claim. These unseemly affairs sometimes crop up in the visual arts, media, and NGOs too, but there’s little evidence people make fraudulent claims of this kind beyond these ivory towers. After all, in most spaces of work or leisure, there is little capital – even of the more amorphous social or cultural variety — to be gained from pretending not to be white. [read full column]
Life Ceremony, Sayaka Murata, trans. Ginny Tapley Takemori
reviewed by Tim Murphy
In January 2023, the Japanese prime minister, Fumio Kishida, made a speech suggesting that the very existence of Japanese society was being threatened by its steadily falling birth rate. While Kishida said that support for child-rearing was now his government’s single most important policy, it is not surprising that Japanese artists have responded to the demographic situation in sometimes provocative ways. Chie Hayakawa’s futuristic 2022 film, Plan 75, for example, concerns a government... [read more]
Jeremy Seabrook, Private Worlds: Growing Up Gay in Post-War Britain
reviewed by Charlie Pullen
On 9 January 1969, a new play called Life Price premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in London’s Sloane Square. Starring June Brown, a young actress who would go on to become famous as Dot Cotton in Eastenders, Life Price was about the murder of a child on ‘a council estate in the Midlands’. With its hard-hitting themes and working-class characters, the play owed something to that bold social realist tradition that had emerged in British culture following the Second World War. Over a... [read more]
Our general sense of ourselves in relation to time has us moving along an x-axis, horizontal, linear, and elongated. To look back into the past is to turn one’s head around, squint, and test one’s power of vision to its fullest, especially if one is trying to discern events from almost 400 years ago.
Yet this isn’t the conception of ourselves in relation to time that Robert Selby is working with in his second book, The Kentish Rebellion. Reading these poems, one gets the feeling that... [read more]
Samuel Beckett was something of a fortune-teller. That is, so much of his textual surface takes place on the pages and stages of uncertain futurity: think, for example, of Endgame’s possible apocalypse occurring without; of the brightening terror of ‘Imagination Dead Imagine’; or of Krapp’s Last Tape, our eponymous clown flitting about his den, enveloped by some ‘late evening in the future’. Beckett will never properly disclose these subjunctive zones, which is their power: their... [read more]
Ismail Kadare, trans. John Hodgson, A Dictator Calls
reviewed by Bronwyn Scott-McCharen
Ismail Kadare’s latest offering in English is a cross between a game of telephone and a crime scene investigation. The crime: an alleged phone call between the feared Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and the famed Soviet writer Boris Pasternak, in which Pasternak either bravely stands up for or cowardly denies any connection to his friend and fellow writer, beleaguered poet Osip Mandelstam. In A Dictator Calls, Kadare serves as chief investigator, continually dissecting and revisiting these three... [read more]
Seichō Matsumoto, trans. Jesse Kirkwood, Tokyo Express
reviewed by William Davies
Since the beginning of the Golden Age of crime writing, trains have provided countless opportunities for excitement and tension. Whether it is trains caught at the very last second, events glimpsed through the windows of speeding carriages, or trains shuttling from the city to the countryside, where, if you agree with W. H. Auden, the best murder mysteries take place, trains have long been a source for drama. Trains can also be their own little worlds of hope and peril. When Agatha Christie put... [read more]
Caroline Magennis, Northern Irish Writing After the Troubles: Intimacies, Affects, Pleasures
reviewed by Archie Cornish
In Anna Burns’s first novel, No Bones (2001), the protagonist Amelia watches as her big sister and a gang of friends deliberately poison themselves. The grown-ups have left the building but there’s not much to do in 1980s Ardoyne. So Lizzie and ‘the Girls’ divide out a ‘twelve-year old nutmeg’ and wash it down with ‘an ancient packet of mustard and a rusty tin of peas’. Amelia watches them laugh in delight as the bad peas explode, ‘one by one inside them’. The violent... [read more]
In 2013, a National Geographic photographer named Steve Winter captured a now-famous image of a Los Angeles icon: lit by the twinkle of the city below, the mountain lion dubbed P-22 slinks past the Hollywood sign, his muscles surging and amber eyes trained on the path ahead. P-22, also known as the Hollywood Cat, is said to have lived in Los Angeles’ Griffith Park for some ten years before being euthanised by scientists in late 2022. When he was officially laid to rest earlier this year in... [read more]
Miquel de Palol, trans. Adrian Nathan West, The Garden of Seven Twilights
reviewed by Josh Billings
To someone raised on a diet of 19th and 20th-century fiction, Miquel de Palol’s The Garden of Seven Twilights reads like a very strange novel. In many ways, it does not read like a novel at all. A huge part of this has to do with its structure. Whereas most contemporary novels move like trains, travelling from a predictable point A to a prearranged, if hopefully satisfying point B, de Palol’s book seems to expand in all directions at once, like a fleet of getaway cars. The experience of... [read more]
Herschel Caine, the 38-year-old protagonist of Andrew Lipstein’s new novel, The Vegan, is in trouble. He may have, indirectly, killed someone. Or almost killed someone. At the beginning of the book, during a small dinner party in his impressive Brooklyn brownstone, Herschel secretly slips a sleeping aid into the drink of his wife’s old college roommate, a loudmouth lush hogging the conversation, in the hopes this would ‘accelerate her jet lag’. But when this suddenly somnolent guest... [read more]
