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 | The Outlaws Scarlett and Browne by Jonathan Stroud {Reviewed by STELLA} Wanted for audacious crimes across England: a sassy young woman adept at robbing banks, outwitting the law, dealing with the Faith and keeping the Tainted at arm's length, not to mention the beasts in the Wildness and the other hustlers in the Surviving Towns. This is the wild west of a dystopian and flooded England. London is covered by water — and at the centre of this lagoon are the Free Isles, while the rest of the country has reverted to wildness and walled towns with strict codes of conduct. The unusual and challenging are not wanted: others are cast into slavery and the Council of the Faith is all-powerful in rhetoric and financial dealings. We meet Scarlett McCain just after she has pulled off a bank robbery and is escaping by taking a route through the wild lands. The trick is to get through and out before darkness falls, evading her pursuers who won’t dare follow under the stars. The problem is she is sidetracked by a bus that has crashed into the woods and the sole survivor, a hapless teen boy, Albert Browne. Help the boy (get him back to the road) and still have time to make it through the trees. This plan doesn’t pan out. The boy is even more mysterious than the evasive Scarlett and some things about the crash and where Albert comes from don’t add up, and now they have pursuers on their tail that aren’t so scared of the beasts coming out to hunt. Scarlett now has a seemingly useless companion with her as she travels cross-country, trying to outrun an enemy she doesn’t know. Let's just say there will be gunshots, wounds, jumping off a cliff, and almost drowning in a river. And, most oddly, pursuers in jackets and bowler hats (sinister!) are after Albert. But why? As they travel together, despite Scarlett’s threats to ditch him (trouble follows Albert and maybe Albert makes trouble), a frightening spectre is rising, and a woman who won’t give up on her desire to recapture Albert enters the picture. While Scarlett puzzles Albert’s abilities, strange as they are, and questions her sanity in sticking with him, she’s also drawn to this unusual young man trying to find a place to belong in this strange, and often uninviting, new world. Putting their faith in a grizzled and grumpy old seafarer (travelling the waterways with his mute granddaughter), his ‘trusty’ boat and his knowledge of the rivers and byways they head in search of the Free Isles where Albert hopes to find a new home. It won’t be plain sailing, at all. There are plenty of twists and turns, daring adventuring and an exciting plot to entice you into this new intriguing world and keep you hooked, wanting more. The first in a new series from the author of 'Lockwood & Co.' (and if you haven’t read these you have been missing out), The Outlaws Scarlett and Browne is mesmerisingly good, their world is fascinating, and Stroud doesn’t miss a beat in laying down some great challenges: climate change, species mutation, psychological manipulation, and power struggles as well as more endearing qualities of humanity in bravery, loyalty and friendship — for his characters as well as the reader. |
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 | Old Masters by Thomas Bernhard {Reviewed by THOMAS} It is very tiring to get everything done properly, he said, it is exhausting and, really, a waste of time to get everything done properly, but it is just as exhausting and just as much a waste of time to get everything done not properly, to do a mediocre job, so to speak, he said. As not doing anything at all does not seem to be an option available to me, despite its attractions, he said, as doing nothing is fraught with its own existential dangers, so to call them, I may as well do everything properly, he said. This is a terrible trap. I will exhaust myself and waste my time whether I do things properly or not, nobody will notice whether I do things properly or not, I am uncertain if I can tell whether I am doing things properly or not myself, but they would notice if I do nothing at all. Perhaps what I call properly is in fact mediocre, I aspire to the mediocre but fall short, or I aspire to excellence and fall short, it makes no difference, I fall to the same point, somewhere below the mediocre, far below excellence, I fall to my place in the order of things whether I aspire to the mediocre or to the excellent, I may as well aspire to excellence, whatever that means, and fail more grandly, he said, though he was unsure if this failure was more grand or more pathetic. He had, he said, entertained the intention, at least briefly, of writing a proper review of Old Masters by Thomas Bernhard, he had been rereading Old Masters not merely but at least partly for the purposes of writing this review, and he had even, while researching this review or this book, discovered what seemed to him to be a video game in which he could move around the galleries of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, although there were some galleries he could not enter for some reason, perhaps he had to advance to another level or perhaps he was just clumsy, avoiding the gallery attendants, searching for the location in which almost the entire book is set: the bench facing the painting White-Bearded Man by Tintoretto. Using the navigation arrows provided for the purpose by Google, he found, the player of the game can become well acquainted with the endless parquet flooring of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, with the marble staircases and gilded cornices and door-frames of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, and with much of what Reger, the dominant voice if not the narrator of Bernard’s book, dismisses as its collection of “Habsburg-Catholic state art. The Kunsthistorisches Museum is entirely in line with the artistic taste of the Habsburgs, who, at least where painting is concerned, had a revolting, totally brainless Catholic artistic taste,” writes Bernhard as Atzbacher quoting Reger, Atzbacher being the book’s narrator, even though pretty much all he does is quote what Reger has at some time said. He must concentrate on his review, he thought, I am determined to write a proper review, he said aloud, forgetting that he had already reviewed the book with a proper review, or in any case something slightly closer to a proper review than what he felt himself now capable of, not that that is saying much, some years before. Old Masters is an entirely musical book, he wrote, starting at last in a sensible way, despite being set in a painting gallery it is entirely musical both in its phrasing and in its structure, if there is a difference between the two, he thought, drifting from the task, the musical form of the book is what matters, he wondered if he could say the form is all that matters, that form is all that ever matters. Old Masters is narrated in one unbroken paragraph by Atzbacher, about whom we learn little, he wrote, but the voice that reaches us is the voice of Reger, an elderly music reviewer, who has arranged to meet Atzbacher on their regular bench in front of the White-Bearded Man but on an irregular day, they normally meet there on alternate days only. Atzbacher arrives early in order to watch Reger waiting for him from the next room, and the first half of the book consists of Atzbacher telling us what Reger has previously told him, of Reger speaking through Atzbacher, so it seems, just as Reger also speaks, as Atzbacher notes, through the museum attendant Irrsigler: “Irrsigler has, over the years, appropriated verbatim many, if not all, or Reger’s sentences. Irrsigler is Reger’s mouthpiece, nearly everything that Irrsigler says has been said by Reger, for over thirty years Irrsigler has been saying what Reger has said. If I listen attentively I can hear Reger speak through Irrsigler.” As with Irrsigler so with Atzbacher, he thinks, Atzbacher seemingly unaware of the irony. Old Masters is a very funny book, he thinks, Reger’s reported opinions amount to a stream of invective against pretty much everything held in esteem in the society in which Reger lives, and in which Bernhard lived, separated as they are only be tense, admiration, after all, being for Bernhard a form of mental weakness. “There has virtually been no culture in Vienna for a long time, and one day there will really be no culture of any kind left in Vienna, but it will nevertheless be a cultural concept even then. Vienna will always be a cultural concept, it will more stubbornly be a cultural concept the less culture there is in it,” writes Benhard as Atzbacher as Reger and perhaps again as Bernhard. Well, he thought, as with Vienna so with Nelson, though I will not write that down, he thought. Heidegger, Stifter, Bruckner, Vienna’s public lavatories, restaurants, politicians, all are derided in the most amusing fashion and at length, he wrote, in this first section, in the words of Reger as remembered by Atzbacher as he watches Reger waiting for him to arrive. This might even be Bernhard’s funniest book, he thought, the way Reger’s ridicule surges through it, builds and collapses. When Atzbacher keeps his appointment with Reger, Reger’s rants continue via Atzbacher, but at one step less remove, the rants continue but the tone changes, subtly, Old Masters might be Bernhard’s both least and most subtle book, he thought, the least subtle because of Reger’s ranting but the most subtle because of the modulation in that ranting, all in this one paragraph, the rant no longer filtered by Atzbacher’s memory is more extreme, nastier, less enjoyable, clumsier, is the fact that I can go along with Reger’s rants in the first half a mark against me, he wondered, and if so am I redeemed by being put off when we meet Reger himself in the second, so to speak, when we meet Reger in the raw, so to speak, he wondered, and Atzbacher intercuts what Reger says to him at this time in the gallery with recollections of what Reger has said to him previously at the Ambassador cafe, and the depth of Reger’s unhappiness since the death of his wife is expressed in sequences of sentences, each ending “...Reger said at the Ambassador then,” repeated like sobs, and the unhappiness flows through and gives depth to the rest of the book, which principally concerns the difficulties of carrying on living is a world devoid of value, Old Masters is perhaps Bernhard’s funniest book and his saddest. “Oh yes, Reger said, the logical conclusion would invariably be total despair about everything. But I am resisting this total despair about everything, Reger said. I am now eighty-two and I am resisting this total despair about everything tooth and nail, Reger said.” Reger’s vitriol is a survival mechanism, he wrote, to despise is to survive, that is clumsily put, he thought, too clumsily put to write down. “One’s mind has to be a searching mind, a mind searching for mistakes, for the mistakes of humanity, a mind searching for failure. The human mind is a human mind only when it searches for the mistakes of humanity, Reger said. A good mind is a mind that searches for the mistakes of humanity and an exceptional mind is a mind that finds the mistakes of humanity, and a genius’s mind is a mind which, having found these mistakes, points them out and with all the means at its disposal shows up these mistakes.” Reger despises nothing more than old masters, so Reger says, and this is why he has sat on his bench at the Kunsthistorisches Museum every other day for thirty years. “Art altogether is nothing but a survival skill, we should never lose sight of this fact, it is, time and again, just an attempt to cope with this world and its revolting aspects, which, as we know, is invariably possible only by resorting to lies and falsehoods, to hypocrisy and self-deception, Reger said. … All these pictures, moreover, are an expression of man’s absolute helplessness in coping with himself and with what surrounds him all his life. … All these so-called old masters are really failures, without exception they were all doomed to failure.” Our obsession with art, he thought, if we have an obsession with art, or with celebrity, if we have that, or with sport performers, so to call them, or with wealthy people, or actors, or singers, is not with how these apogees of achievement are more successful than us, more skilled, more wonderful, more spiritual even, whatever we mean by that, but with the flaws, the weaknesses, vices and misfortunes that make them like us after all, failures, and we are reassured that not even great success, however that is measured, not even great skill, not even great fame would stop us from being failures, and so we need not therefore even strive for these things, they would not in any case save us, so to speak. When the worst happens, though, we are devastated but it is not true to say that we do not also feel relief, and this is the saddest thing of all, he thought. “Reger was looking at the White Bearded Man and said, the death of my wife has not only been my greatest misfortune, it has also set me free. With the death of my wife I have become free, he said, and when I say free I mean entirely free, wholly free, completely free, if you know, or if at least you surmise, what I mean. I am no longer waiting for death, it will come by itself, it will come without my thinking of it, it does not matter to me when. The death of a beloved person is also an enormous liberation of our whole system, Reger now said. I have lived for some time now with the feeling of being totally free. I can now let anything approach me, really anything, without having to resist, I no longer resist anything, that is it, Reger Said.” Atzbacher accepts the ticket Reger offers him to attend a performance of Kleist’s The Broken Jug, a work also mocking human faillings, at the Bergtheater that evening, but, Atzbacher says, “The performance was terrible,” ending the book with the first opinion he has expressed that might be his own, though, given the formative influence of Reger upon him, can any opinion be his own, can anyone’s opinion anyway be considered their own, he wondered. I will give up on this review, he decided, I cannot write the review properly he realised, whatever could constitute properly, perhaps I could have done so once but I can do so no longer, at least not today, the only day I have to write it, he thought, my mind no longer performs in that way. He had spent a long time playing the Kunsthistorische Museum game but he could not find the painting of the White Bearded Man. |
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For most of the approximately 300,000 years that Homo sapiens have existed, we have shared the planet with at least four other types of humans. All of these were smart, strong, and inventive. But around 50,000 years ago, Homo sapiens made a cognitive leap that gave us an edge over other species. What happened? Since Charles Darwin wrote about 'evolutionary fitness', the idea of fitness has been confused with physical strength, tactical brilliance, and aggression. In fact, what made us evolutionarily fit was a remarkable kind of friendliness, a virtuosic ability to coordinate and communicate with others that allowed us to achieve all the cultural and technical marvels in human history.
"Brilliant, eye-opening, and absolutely inspiring—and a riveting read. Hare and Woods have written the perfect book for our time." —Cass R. Sunstein
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 | The Writing of the Disaster by Maurice Blanchot {Reviewed by THOMAS} “The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact.” The Writing of the Disaster concerns the effect upon language, upon literature, so to call it, of what Blanchot, thinking particularly of the Holocaust, calls the Disaster: something beyond the reach of language yet sucking language towards it to the ultimate nullification of the meaning that language is usually thought to bear. The disaster does not concern itself with content, the disaster possesses the writing and is not and cannot be the subject of the writing. The writing of the disaster is not so much writing about the disaster as writing in the force-field of the disaster: The Writing of the Disaster concerns itself with the ways in which trauma takes ownership of writing. The ‘of’ in the title signals possession in the same way, perhaps, that all objects possess their subjects and by this relationship contend with them for agency. The disaster is a grammatical phenomenon, a loss of agency through grammar, a relation between elements rather than an element itself. Blanchot is remarkable for identifying the shifts of agency that result from grammatical alteration. It is in grammar, perhaps, that our problems lie, and it is in grammar, perhaps, that we must agitate for their solution. But it is in the nature of the disaster to protect itself with our passivity. “We are passive with respect to the disaster, but the disaster is perhaps passivity.” The disaster robs the writer of agency, cauterises meaning, averts all gazes and renders the usual useless. As Blanchot demonstrates, writing in the ambit of the disaster can only proceed in fragments. Failure and incompletion are both results of and assaults upon the impossible. “It is not you who will speak; let the disaster speak in you, even if it be by your forgetfulness or silence.” When writing of the reading of the writing of the disaster, the semantic degeneration of the disaster exercises itself even through the intervening writer, rendering them transparent. To re-read a passage of Blanchot is to read without recognition, to entertain thoughts quite different from, and rightly quite different from, those entertained on the first reading, or prior readings, of that passage. Thinking about reading about Blanchot writing about how the disaster affects everything but cannot be perceived, I write, “The disaster is that no distinction can be made between disaster and the absence of disaster,” but I cannot determine where this sentence comes from. I cannot find it in Blanchot's text. Whose thoughts are those thoughts thought when reading? If the thoughts cannot be located in the text, are they then the thoughts of the reader? If the thoughts would not have been thought by the reader without the text, to what extent are they the writer’s thoughts? (Do not ask if these thoughts are in fact thoughts. Let us call thought that which does the work of thought, regardless.) Blanchot proceeds around, or towards, the disaster in a fragmentary style, aphoristic but without the sense of completion aphorisms provide, he writes koans, or antikoans, that do not prepare the mind for enlightenment so much as relieve the mind of the possibility of, and even the concept of, enlightenment. Taken in small doses Blanchot is full of meaning but as the dose increases the meaning becomes less, until at the point of his complete oeuvre, we can extrapolate, Blanchot means nothing at all. This liberation from semantic burden is entirely in accord with Blanchot’s project, so to call it. |
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  | Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu {Reviewed by STELLA} “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; / They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts.” —William Shakespeare (As You Like It) While Shakespeare went on to describe the seven stages of man, Charles Yu takes a slightly different trajectory. The stage is America, more specifically Chinatown. The players are the actors in a typical cop show (ironically titled Black and White) and the residents of the SRO (Single Room Occupancy) housing apartment. And our main man is Willis Wu, son of Taiwanese immigrants, working his way up the ladder. Seven stages — a countdown from five to one (Background Oriental Male, Dead Asian Man, Generic Asian Man Number Three/Delivery Guy, Generic Asian Man Number Two/Waiter, Generic Asian Man Number One), and then, if you are lucky, very lucky — Very Special Guest Star, and for the few, the ultimate role — Kung Fu Guy. Interior Chinatown, Yu’s fourth book, which won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2020, uses a television series script as the structural device to look into the real lives of Asian Americans and the stereotypes that ring-fence them as ‘other’. As in Yu’s early books (his short story collection from 2006, Third Class Superhero, is endlessly memorable), he uses clever set-ups and sardonic wit to take you on an entertaining journey that is actually filled with frustration, sadness and, in the case of Interior Chinatown, a searing elucidation of racism. Willis Wu is an actor, hoping for the big time — a chance to become Kung Fu Guy. He’s the ‘Asian’ in the GTV series Black and White (featuring Turner — the tough smart Black cop, and Green — the sassy sharpshooting (from the lip as much as the hip) White female cop) — starting as Background Guy but also next up a corpse. After being a corpse, he has to take a "rest time". No-one will notice when he comes back as a new guy — after all, he is Generic Asian Man. He gets his real breakthrough when his character becomes integral to solving a crime in Chinatown. “It’s a cultural thing,” Green lets Black know. Yet as Willis moves up the ranks he finds himself disenchanted by his (and everyone else who lives in the SRO) obsession, from childhood (all that practice!), with becoming Kung Fu Guy. This could have been just a silly and entertaining story about a TV script, but this is where Yu does something very clever — he moves us between reality and fiction, mingling Willis’s life on the screen with his life (and those of his family and community) as an Asian man in America. The backstories of his parents and their arrival in America alongside the acting careers (are they workers in the Chinese restaurant downstairs or actors in the TV series working in the Golden Palace — or a bit of both?), the lives of the residents of the SRO, sometimes they are suffering the heat, the bad piping and cramped quarters while at other times they a bit part actors on the screen, the story of Willis meeting his wife-to-be through their acting roles, art imitating life and vice versa. Plenty of meta-narrative playfully executed and effectively used to grapple with the issues Charles Yu is exploring, along with his own personal histories. What does it take to be seen as American? Why are the stereotypes so entrenched? And how can Willis Wu find out who he really is in a society with rigid expectations of “Generic Asian Man”? Immensely enjoyable, unflinching in its assessment of racism and endlessly memorable. |
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 | First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami {Reviewed by STELLA} Where does a writer go and where do they want to take us? In Murakami’s new collection of short stories, First Person Singular, the writer is teasing at the edges, walking us into situations that at first glance seem banal, then become unsettling, sometimes a little bizarre. This will be nothing new for Murakami readers—the pace of the unfolding tale and the direct, simple style with its surprising outcome and underlying pathos are all familiar tropes. In this collection Murakami is also talking to himself, reminiscing and sharing his passions. Music, jazz and classical, comes to the fore in several. 'Cream', the opening story, has a young man on the way to a piano recital by a young woman he barely knows (an ex-fellow student who he had let down by being a tardy musician), only to find himself sitting alone in a small park having a conversation with an elderly man. He has either been duped in an act of revenge or mistaken by date and time. Either way, he is somewhat flustered by the whole experience, left clutching a cheap bouquet of red flowers with little idea of why he went in the first place. In classic Murakami style, the book opens with this deceptively dull story. Later, thinking about it, your focus comes back to the elderly man—is this a future self giving advice or a chance encounter that will change the young man’s trajectory? Or maybe encounters like this don’t encompass as much as we would like them to? In 'Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova', Murakami is at his most playful, enjoying his obsession with jazz and playfully imaging and reimaging a role for The Bird beyond the grave. When Charlie Parker visits the narrator in a dream sequence Murakami segues into his style of magical realism which leaves the reader in no doubt that the character is playing out an internal conversation, while at the same time being convincingly ‘realistic' or believable. If you delve a little under this story, and others in the collection, it is obvious that Murakami is also thinking about the process of creativity, of writing. There are raw edges here too, especially those stories that deal with relationships. 'With the Beatles' relays a teen relationship—starting from an oblique point and sharpening into an uneasy story about depression and suicide. It has a lightness of touch that could be seen as almost trivial but underpinning this is the tragedy of being misunderstood or trapped within a moment. Many of the stories have this outwardly simple trajectory and try to relieve themselves of a complex plot cutting to the uneasy situations that arise between people, but more essentially within one’s own psyche. Touted as partly memoir—the narrator is an ageing writer, living in Japan, who loves baseball and music—it easily can be read as autofiction. Yet the inclusion of a talking monkey, the ‘ugliest’ woman and a surreal conversation with a dead musician, makes you wonder how much Murakami is inviting his past work and his readers into the world beyond the wall, into the well, and, as he says, into the ‘under basement’. Memoir-ish pieces maybe, but more another realm to explore writing, where it takes us and how far, and how it happens. Simple and complex in equal measure. |
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 | In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova {Reviewed by THOMAS} The past gets bigger every day, he realised, every day the past gets a day bigger, but the present never gets any bigger, if it has a size at all it stays the same size, every day the present is more overwhelmed by the past, every moment in fact the present more overwhelmed by the past. Perhaps that should be longer rather than bigger, he thought, same difference, he thought, not making sense but you know what I mean, he thought, the present has no duration but the duration of the past swells with every moment, pushing at us, pushing us forward. Anything that exists is opposed by the fact of its existing to anything that might take its existence away, he wrote, the past is determined to go on existing but it can only do this by hijacking the present, he wrote, by casting itself forward and co-opting the present, or trying to, by clutching at us with objects or images or associations or impressions or with what we could call stories, wordstuff, whatever, harpooning us who live only in the present with what we might call memory, the desperation, so to call it, of that which no longer exists except to whatever degree it attaches itself to us now, the desperation to be remembered, to persist, even long after it has gone. Memory is not something we achieve, he wrote, memory is something that is achieved upon us by the past, by something desperate to exist and go on existing, by something carrying us onwards, if there is such a thing as onwards, something long gone, dead moments, ghosts preserving their agency through objects, images, words, impressions, associations, all that, he wrote, coming to the end of his thought. This book, he thought, Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory, is not really about memory at all in the way we usually understand it, it is not about the way an author might go around recalling experiences she had at some previous point in her life, this book is about the way the past forces itself upon us, the way the past forces itself upon us particularly along the channels of family, of ancestry, of blood, so to call it, pushing us before it in such as way that we cannot say if our participation in this process is in accordance with our will or against it, the distinction in any case makes no sense, he thought, there is only the imperative of all particulars not so much to go on existing, despite what I said earlier, though this is certainly the effect, as to oppose, by the very fact of their particularity, any circumstance that would take that existence away. Everything opposes its own extinction, he thought, even me. That again. But the past is vulnerable, too, which is why memory is desperate, a clutching, the past depends upon us to bear its particularity, and we have become adept at fending it off, at replacing it with the stories we tell ourselves about it. The stories we tell about the past are the way we keep the past at bay, the way we keep ourselves from being overwhelmed by this swelling urgent unrelenting past. “There is too much past, and everyone knows it,” writes Stepanova, “The excess oppresses, the force of the surge crashes against the bulwark of any amount of consciousness, it is beyond control and beyond description. So it is driven between banks, simplified, straightened out, chased still-living into the channels of narrative.” When Stepanova’s aunt dies she inherits an apartment full of objects, photographs, letters, journals, documents, and she sets about defusing the awkwardness of this archive’s demands upon her through the application of the tool with which she has proficiency, her writing. Although she writes the stories of her various ancestors and of her various ancestors’ various descendants, she is aware that “this book about my family is not about my family at all, but about something quite different: the way memory works, and what memory wants from me.” Stepanova’s family is unremarkable from a historical point of view, Russian Jews to whom nothing particularly traumatic happened, notwithstanding the possibilities during the twentieth century for all manner of traumatic things to happen to those such as them, and they were not marked out for fame or glory, either, whatever that means, in any case they had no wish to be noticed. History is composed mainly of ordinariness, the non-dramatic predominates, he thought, although there may be notable crises pressing on these particular people, Stepanova’s family for example but the same is true for most people, these notable crises do not actually happen to these particular people. Do not equals did not. The past, as the present, he wrote, was undoubtedly mundane for most people most of the time, and yet they still went on existing, at least resisting their extinction in the most banal of fashions. Is this conveyed in history, though, family or otherwise, he wondered, how does the repetitive uneventfulness of everyday life in the past press upon the present, if at all? Can we appreciate any particularity in the mundanity of the past, he wondered, are we not like the tiny porcelain dolls, the ‘Frozen Charlottes’ that Stepanova collects, produced in vast numbers, flushed out into the world, identical and unremarkable except where the damage caused by their individual histories imbues them with particularity, with character? “Trauma makes us individuals—singly and unambiguously—from the mass product,” Stepanova writes. Who would we be without hardship, if indeed we could be said to be? No idea, not that this was anyway a question for which he had anticipated an answer, he thought. “Memory works on behalf of separation,” Stepanova writes. “It prepares for the break without which the self cannot emerge.” Memory is an exercise of edges, he thought, and all we have are edges, the centre has no shape, there is only empty space. He thought of Alexander Sokurov’s film Russian Ark, and thought how it too piled detail upon detail to reduce the transmission—or to prevent the formation—of ideas about the past, the past piles more and more information upon us in the present, occluding itself in detail, veiling itself, reducing both our understanding and our ability to understand. Stepanova’s words pile up, her metaphors pile up, her sentences pile up, her words ostensibly offer meaning but actually withhold it, or ration it. Although In Memory of Memory is in most ways nothing like Russian Ark, he thought, why did he start this comparison, as with Russian Ark, In Memory of Memory is—entirely appropriately—both fascinating and boring, both too long and never quite reaching a point of satisfaction, the characters both recognisable and uncertain but in any case torn away, at least from us, the actions both deliberate and without any clear rationale or consequence—just like history itself. No residue. No thoughts. No realisations. No salient facts. No wisdom. The past drives us onward, pushes us outward as it inflates. |
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 | She-Merchants, Buccaneers and Gentlewomen: British women in India, 1600—1900 by Katie Hickman {Reviewed by STELLA} There have been plenty of histories about the British in India, but Katie Hickman’s She-Merchants, Buccaneers & Gentlewomen takes a slightly different tack. It starts earlier (the focus being the late 1700s and the first half of the nineteenth century), with the very first few women to venture forth on the long and perilous sea journey. Some were accompanying husbands, others were mistresses of recalcitrant aristocrats, and yet others, women of daring, saw an opportunity in trade in the early days of the East India Company. It also has a female focus, drawing on the letters, diaries and reminiscences of these women. While Hickman does mention the orphans and lower-class women sent to bolster the female numbers in this male-centric military society, the records are few and far between for these less literate classes. So, aside from the past prostitutes/mistresses (many of whom were mixing with the upper classes and as such knew the benefits of brushing up on their letters) now posing as gentlewomen, our stories are firmly fixed in the middle classes and gentry categories. As with many colonial histories, it is the early years that seem more flexible, with marriages of military soldiers (although most often the Indian wives were abandoned, usually with their children, when their supposed husbands left) and officers to Indian women and a few British women in relationships with local men. Not surprisingly this was not necessarily what society back home wished for. A policy was employed to encourage more women, ostensibly to become wives to the increasing number of British troops and civil servants, to travel to India as colonisation ramped up. Hickman sticks with the accounts of daily life, the routines of British society increasingly transplanted (even when they were nonsensical), and the long overland journeys that many women made—some following their military husbands when they were sent to a new posting; others venturing out alone (with servants and the occasional lover), wishing to escape their husbands and the confines of British society. The accounts of great entourages (hundreds of animals—elephants, horses—and thousands of people—servants and soldiers) larger than many of the villages they passed by seems strange now, but was a reality of the aristocratic travellers making their mark on this place. Power and pomp. Hickman recounts the 1875 uprising near the end of her book, signposting the reasons it happened obliquely, rather than head-on, laying out the attitudes of the women through their letters, comments and memoirs. The viewpoint of the rebellion is clearly from the women who were hunkered down in (often inadequate) fortresses under great distress or who narrowly escaped death. Yet it is here that you clearly see the sticky problem—while these women as individuals were diverse in their attitudes, social positions and enlightenment (or not), some of them admirable (many not), they were nevertheless all part of the wider project of colonisation. She-Merchants, Buccaneers & Gentlewomen is a fascinating look at the individual accounts of women—there are plenty of intriguing tales, both troublesome and diverting—who ventured to India in this period, but it will raise more questions about the role of these women and the imprint they may have left than are answered here. |
| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | |
 | Motherhood by Sheila Heti {Reviewed by THOMAS} Is flipping coins to determine answers to questions posed by the flipper of the coins a good way to guide your life? no Is flipping coins to determine answers to questions posed by the flipper of the coins a good way to write a book? no But isn’t this book, Motherhood, which has been written by flipping coins to determine the answers to questions posed by the flipper of the coins, in this case Sheila Heti, the author of the book, a good book? yes Is Motherhood a good book, then, because it was written by Sheila Heti rather than because it was written by flipping coins? yes When Sheila—the Sheila who is a character in the book, which the reader is permitted to assume is the same person (whatever that means) as Sheila Heti the author of the book— says, “I don’t think I have a heart—a heart I can consult. Instead, I have these coins,” is that a good way for either the character in the book or the author of the book to proceed? no Is flipping coins to determine the answers to questions posed by the flipper of the coins a good way to write a review of a book that has been written by flipping coins to determine the answers to questions posed by the author? no If I wrote a review in such a way, would I be able to do it without cheating, in other words, without only pretending that I had flipped coins when I had not actually flipped coins at all, or flipping the coins but then overriding the outcomes of those coins if they did not suit me? no Would it be better if I didn’t waste time looking for coins to flip, then? yes And Sheila Heti, can I be sure that she didn’t cheat when writing a book by flipping coins to determine the answers to questions she posed? no Does this matter? no In fact, might this not be a good way to compose a novel or somesuch, or find a way out of writer’s block, whatever that is, or determine a way out of any predicament, at least any fictional predicament, given that predicaments usually arise from the presence of binaries—either A or not-A, for example—and so seem to clamour for a resolution that can be expressed in a binary way? yes Just as writing conversation can be a good way to find a way out of writer’s block, whatever that is, even writer’s block visited upon the writing of a book review? yes Even if one side of the conversation says only either yes or no? yes Are the results I might achieve this way satisfactory? no Would the results be satisfactory with a different approach? no Is any of this useful in so-called real life? no But doesn’t Sheila Heti apply this approach to the real-life question—if we accept that the Sheila of the book corresponds to the real-life Sheila, the book’s author—of whether or not she wants to or should have a child, or become a mother, which may or may not imply having a child, depending on how subtly the concept of motherhood is understood or defined? yes So this approach is not useful? no You mean it is useful? yes Can you explain that? no Can Sheila Heti explain that? yes Does she do so in this passage, when she consults her coins? “Is any of the above true? no Is there any use in any of this, if none of it is true? no Even if you said yes, it wouldn’t matter. You don’t mean anything to me. You don’t know the future, and you don’t know anything about my life, or what I should be doing. You are complete randomness, without meaning. [However] you have shown me some good things, but that is just me picking up the good in all the nothing you have shown me.” yes As Sheila approaches forty she suffers from ambivalence about whether or not to have a child before it is ‘too late’. She can’t seem to disentangle what might be the expectations of her by others because she is a woman from what might be her biological inclinations as a woman, not that this concept necessarily has any validity, and from her own personal expectations and inclinations. Is it even possible to disentangle these things? no Would it be true to say that the more you think about things in these terms the less sense these terms make? yes Is there any point in thinking about things in these terms? no Unless, perhaps, it is useful to get to the point at which these terms make no sense? yes Does Sheila obsess over the question of whether or not to have a child as a way of relieving herself of the question of whether or not to have a child? yes A way of avoiding having a child, even? yes Saying yes to having a child would remove the uncertainty of whether or not to have a child and the uncertainty could not be regained, at least not in that form, but saying no merely provides the opportunity for the uncertainty to resurge at the next possible moment for it to be considered. Prevarication is, therefore, such a tiring prophylactic. Is the book to some extent somehow about the deep problems of decision-making, in whatever sphere of life, about whether we can disentangle the force of what we might call ‘will’ from the force of what we might, for want of a better word, call ‘fate’ (‘determinism’ is probably a better word)? yes When Sheila says, “Sometimes I am convinced that a child will add depth to all things—just bring a background of depth and meaning to whatever it is I do. I also think I might have brain cancer. There’s something I can feel in my brain, like a finger pressing down,” is her problem really about depth and meaning rather than about having a child? yes Sheila says, “This will be a book to prevent future tears.” Is this book, Motherhood, perhaps more about depression—Sheila’s, her mother’s, perhaps the reader’s—than it is about motherhood per se? no Sheila says, “I am a blight on my own life.” She says, “Nothing harms the earth more than another person—and nothing harms a person more than being born.” She says, thinking of her decision to be a writer and all the time she has consequently spent arranging commas, “When I was younger, writing felt like more than enough, but now I feel like a drug addict, like I’m missing out on life.” Is there a sense in which writing and ‘living’ are incompatible modes of existence? yes When Sheila states that resisting urges has previously led her to more interesting places, is it useful for her to think about resisting the urge to have a child—wherever that urge originates—as a way of bringing depth and meaning to her life? yes Does she in fact find more depth and meaning by resisting the urge to have a child? yes Does this depth and meaning, or at least the finding of more depth and meaning if not the depth and meaning themselves, have some sort of tangible expression? yes This book? yes Early in the book, Heti identifies her struggles with the mythic struggles of Jacob wrestling with and withstanding the unknown being “until the breaking of the day,” and she concludes the book an altered quote from the Torah: “Then I named this wrestling-place Motherhood, for here is where I saw God face-to-face, and yet my life was spared.” Is that a satisfactory way to end the book? yes Is that a satisfactory way to end my review? no Should I go on? no |
