Last Scene Underground: A Review
Varzi plays the role of what the anthropologist Renato Rosaldo has called a positioned observer, trying to make sense of life long after the ethnographer’s duty of detailed description has been completed. Clifford Geertz has described creative ethnographers such as Varzi as novelists manqu é, and she captures what I elsewhere have theorized as ethnographic surfeit. This surfeit is what remains after an ethnographer has paid dues to the science of empirical social knowledge. What is left is not quite hard data, but nonetheless an invaluable remainder of insight, affect, conversation, and emotion; an entire sensorium, which even if the ethnographer wants to, will not let her go.
Ather Zia reviews Last Scene Underground by Roxanne Varzi.
The Oddity
Sometimes there is a rare moment of clarity — a moment when the bullshit and anger and fears and jealousies get pushed aside and the only thing left is the reality of you and me. But here is the problem…
What good is this reality when we’ve buried it under all that anger and jealousy and resentment? What fucking good is it?
And the problem is, there is no fixing, no repair, there is no thing to be done there is just too much wrong, too much that is fucked, too little that we can do, there is in fact nothing we can do, it is just fucking hopeless it is…
So.
Despair.
Chapter 8 of EJ Spode‘s novel The Oddity.