Unknowability is perhaps the great theme of Greenwell’s novels so far: ‘we can never be sure of what we want,’ as the narrator puts it in Cleanness (2020). If there is a single writerly technique that defines all three books, it’s locating with surgical precision the moments where a person reveals some new part of themselves. This motif appears most strikingly in What Belongs To You (2016), when the narrator rejects his lover, Mitko, who responds with the threat of danger: ‘he wore a face I hadn’t seen before. . . I wondered whether it was a face he had just discovered or one he had hidden all along.’ But it’s in sickness that this inscrutability, this division, finds its truest form. [read full essay]
Almost the sole focus of writing about psychotropic intoxicants in the present generation is the therapeutic uses to which they might be put: to alleviate anxiety, depression, the more severe symptoms of Parkinson's disease, post-traumatic stress, addictive behaviours, Tourette's, just about anything. Microdosing LSD has evidently brought a sense of human perspective to the android labour in Silicon Valley. We would all be better off, it seems, if we were a degree or two further along the spectrum from the zero point of cold, raw sobriety. We wouldn't need to drink as much. Other people would seem nicer. [read full essay]
Munir Hachemi, trans. Julia Sanchez, Living Things
reviewed by Peter Adkins
Meat eaters are bad readers. Or so the protagonist of Munir Hachemi’s debut novel, Living Things, comes to believe when, after a night working on an industrial chicken farm, he realises that his understanding of animal agriculture has rested on a false consciousness. The cheap cuts of meat that he had previously happily subsisted upon are in fact documents of barbarism and horror. In a novel preoccupied with the capacities of literature to confront the ruthlessness of the contemporary world... [read more]
Kohei Saito, trans. Brian Bergstrom, Slow Down: How Degrowth Communism Can Save the Earth
reviewed by Sam Gregory
In his 2006 film about Stalinism, Joebuilding, Jonathan Meades explains how the Soviet Union set out to bend the environment, as it did people, to its will. ‘[Stalin] was a greater force than nature, he created inland seas, his slave labourers died in their thousands digging bloated canals more ostentatious than utility demanded. . . their function was to prove the state’s might. Like many autocrats before him, Stalin determined to control the climate. Unlike them, he partially... [read more]
In his 2005 review of Reading Lolita in Tehran, Christopher Hitchens refers to what he considers the ‘Amis test’ regarding Nabokov’s original: basically, who spots or misses the very early (pre-H.H.) reference to Mrs ‘Richard F. Schiller’ (‘dead on arrival’, as Amis had it). Tucked up in a fictional foreword, the detail is given ‘For the benefit of old-fashioned readers who wish to follow the destinies of the “real” people beyond the “true” story.’
I’m pretty sure... [read more]
‘Ghost Mountain was Ghost Mountain’. This is the refrain throughout Rónán Hession’s mesmerising third novel. It is about a mountain that suddenly appears. It is about the meaning and intentions people attribute to the mountain. It is about Ghost Mountain’s lack of meaning and intention. Ghost Mountain is like a stone dropped into a pond. Hession fills his book with the ripples.
Ghost Mountain arrives quietly, misting into view:
It was, in the ordinary sense of the word, a... [read more]
To read The Coiled Serpent is to live out an indignant maid’s wildest revenge fantasy without getting sticky fingers. A can of horse glue, one of Grudova’s recurring objects, might feature alongside tiny scissors and a voodoo doll on the worktop of someone harbouring particularly bitter feelings towards an alpha ex-boyfriend. In such a case, reading this tantalising collection of stories is a much neater coping strategy.
The collection ranges widely. There’s the gothic tale,... [read more]
Becca Rothfeld, All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess
reviewed by Grace Tomlinson
A chapter in US critic Becca Rothfeld’s astonishing debut essay collection, All Things Are Too Small, opens with professional minimalist Marie Kondo ripping out what she wants to keep from her books and disposing of the rest. Her newly freed pages are printed with sentences that inspire her, and are therefore allowed their paper-thin allotment in Kondo’s carefully decluttered home.
The more extreme minimalist can save yet more space, if only in one dimension, by cutting out these... [read more]
In the 1890s, with the rise of electric lighting and the need for copper wiring, the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, headquartered in Butte, Montana, and owned by Irishman Marcus Daly, became one of the largest mining operations in the entire world. Buttressed by an enormous vein of copper, Butte was a boomtown, and the resulting labor opportunities — potentially lucrative but extremely dangerous — attracted an influx of Irish immigrants. By the turn of the century, over a quarter of its... [read more]
Matthew Worley, Zerox Machine: Punk, Post-Punk and Fanzines in Britain, 1976-88
reviewed by Alexis Forss
The hiss of tape and a murmur of studio ambient: someone laughs, cusses, or maybe crashes into something. Then the clicking drumsticks and here comes the count-in. Onetwothreefour! Amateurism, demystification, and materiality announce themselves at the top of a punk track, cleansing and corroding, nihilating and liberating, not only blasting towards a new musical future but also carving out a hard rock orthodoxy. And anyone can play. Maybe this rings a bell: ‘This is a chord. This is another.... [read more]
Around the turn of the Millennium the English — some of them — started thinking anew about their national identity, and how to disentangle it from Britishness. A catalyst, looking back, is often supposed to be the England men’s football team’s charge to the semi-finals of Euro 1996. The years since have seen a stream of enquiries into Englishness across a range of fields, from sociology to the history of pop music. After Brexit, the discussion has narrowed to politics, with several... [read more]
What is a good death? Does it depend on how we die, or where we end up next?
In her first book, Intervals, Marianne Brooker tells the story of her mother’s decision to stop eating and drinking after being diagnosed with primary progressive multiple sclerosis. But this is not simply a personal memoir of illness and death. From its very first pages, where Brooker deciphers the transformative power of imagining a better life from a children’s story about a toy rabbit, Intervals is a... [read more]
