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Privileges of Fiction (Rita Felski, Theory Without a Capital T)
Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique, like her Uses of Literature, is admirably clear and accessible but the former is aimed primarily at an academic audience. I don’t have, nor wish to acquire an...
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Article 1
We shortchange the significance of art by focusing on the “de” prefix (its power to demystify, destabilise, denaturalise) at the expense of the “re” prefix: its ability to recontexualise, reconfigure,...
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Jessa Crispin’s The Dead Ladies Project
Somewhere around St. Petersburg and W. Somerset Maugham, it became clear that The Dead Ladies Project isn’t to be shoehorned into any of the recognisable classifications that exist for contemporary...
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Drowsy Rambling about Kundera and Adorno
It might be that Milan Kundera’s Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts is one of the best books I have read on the art of the novel. I pause at the word “read,” which feels inadequate because I...
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Tomas Espedal’s Against Nature, Against Art
Tomas Espedal’s Against Art and Against Nature are exquisite, as good as anything I’ve ever read. Our modern preoccupation with, and anxiety about, intimate interpersonal relationships comes through...
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Tomas Espedal’s Tramp
Reading Tomas Espedal, Tramp (Or The Art of Living a Wild and Poetic Life), always a heartbeat away from stuffing a few items into my worn leather backpack and sneaking silently towards the coast....
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Houellebecq Strikes a Pose
In the latest issue of The Quarterly Conversation, Adrian Nathan West captures my sentiment in the immediate aftermath of reading Michel Houellebecq’s Submission: The worst fate a writer can suffer is...
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American Immigration
We’re building in precisely the same way in the country as we build in the cities, and our first glimpse of a rural community is like the first glimpse of any suburb: a petrol station, a shopping...
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Catherine Clément’s The Call of the Trance
It isn’t easy to imagine the audience Seagull Books had in mind for Catherine Clément’s The Call of the Trance, insufficiently comprehensive for anthropology or psychology students though of some...
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The Impossibility of Connection
On another day I’ll read László Krasznahorkai’s Seiobo There Below hungrily. After an intensely beautiful first chapter, the second chapter begins with an untranslated Italian crossword. This, and the...
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Fra Keeler’s Influences
Reading is pure pleasure for me, without obligation, professional or otherwise. I abandon books frequently after fifty pages or halfway through, whichever comes first. For every book I finish, three...
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Han Kang’s The Vegetarian
It’s been ages since I read a book as fast as I read The Vegetarian by Han Kang, with its savagely beautiful cover. Fifty pages in I knew that this well-written novel, translated by Deborah Smith,...
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Genre Sublimation (Bieńczyk, Sebald, Bae Suah)
It isn’t possible to read books like Marek Bieńczyk’s Transparency without seeing traces of Sebald, rather like the lost Da Vinci that might lie hidden behind the Vasari mural in Florence. Bieńczyk’s...
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Admitting Light: Not Entirely
In Ancient Greece they used the lovely word diaphanes. You can repeat it for its pleasure alone, not knowing what it means, but feeling how it fills the mouth with clear air and opens it to the sun...
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Transparency, Transparencia, Prezroczystość
Here’s a taster of Marek Bieńczyk’s Transparency, so good that I want to share, but also because typing it here it slows me down. This is one of those books, that you want to inhabit as long as...
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Strange Struggle With Meaning
It was during this translation [of Blanchot’s work] that I experienced another strange struggle with meaning: when in a simpler paragraph I found I could follow the thread of M. Blanchot’s argument...
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Max Frisch, Bae Suah and Meaningless Existence
There are my old chestnuts, those writers to whom I’ve become attached. They are sufficient that I could just read and reread their works till the end, but something compels me to seek out new voices,...
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Istanbul Rewards Persistence
Finished reading Istanbul: Memories of a City by Orhan Pamuk, a book I almost abandoned on a couple of occasions, struggling with its insipid writing style. Through a series of thematic essays, Pamuk...
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Blue-bottle in a Jar
Last week, I took Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul to the city that is its subject, but read very little. Istanbul, whose siren’s call I’ve heard since watching Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s crazy films, left little time...
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The Dispute Between Mind and Speech
Relations between Mind and Speech were always difficult and fraught. They sometimes clashed like two warriors-or two lovers. Each wished to do better than the other. Mind said: ‘I am surely better than...
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