Like Francis Bacon’s ‘Furies’ there are moments when these tales are bent out of shape, by history, or by the sheer cumulative weight of their own melancholy. But then someone will stand a round, or Frank Begbie will fleetingly renounce violence, or Fossenkemper issue an unexpected sexual directive, and a more fluid commons will once more find its feet.
Koushik Banerjea reviews The Seal Club by Alan Warner, Irvine Welsh and John King.
The suggestion here is that the ‘I’ (like the ‘it’ in expressions like ‘it is raining’) is simply a verbal construct — a placeholder for an agency which only exists in language and whose entire being consists in ‘a name’. For Borges’ narrator, the Zahir destroyed his identity; for this collection, it simply revealed the existing cracks.
Accordingly, much of Zahir treats language with a degree of distrust.
Oscar Mardell reviews the Zahir: Desire and Eclipse anthology edited by Christian Patracchini.
‘Everyone I know says they’ve met a chauvo-feminist at some point during the past few years,’ says Sam Mills in this excellent book. I am sure she is right, and I greeted the text with some relief because chauvo-feminism is exceedingly difficult to deal with; to someone on the end of it, it may feel intractable, hard to prove and you may think it is only you. You may be told, if you dare to challenge the man who practices it, that you have entirely misunderstood; it is all in your head and no-one else has a problem. So why are you making a fuss? Perhaps you will even wonder if you are going mad. All these things have happened to me, at several points in my life and more recently where their effects were appalling for my view of myself, self-esteem, and trust in others.
Anna Vaught reviews Sam Mills‘s Chauvo-Feminism.
Kelso documents a precursor of sorts to Burroughs’ transatlantic shit-stirring in the serial killer and rapist Peter Thomas Anthony Manuel. I think the inclusion here of these grim and apparently unrelated facts is not entirely normal in a biography, but feels like an important hangover from Kelso’s fiction. He’s always been good at making unusual connections, and his idea that Manuel was a demon seed from across the water whose planting on Scottish soil was the beginning of mutations in the country’s collective psyche preparing its population for further subversions is an interesting one.
Matt Neil Hill reviews Chris Kelso‘s Burroughs and Scotland.
“People under seventy and over seven are very unreliable if they are not cats,” somebody says a few pages into Leonora Carrington’s 1974 novel The Hearing Trumpet. Most people would agree; if anything, the bad run of septuagenarians of late shows this age range is too narrow. The statement is characteristic of this chatoyant novel. Cats are everywhere in The Hearing Trumpet: their sheddings are collected to form a sleeveless cardigan; psychic powers are attributed to them; the earth freezes over and an earthquake thins out the human population, but the cats survive. Beneath its cattiness, the remark also offhandedly conflates species (the way “people” transmutes into “cats” at the end of the sentence) and recognizes the virtue of people usually excluded from civic life for being too young or too old. This broadening out of our ordinary categories of human life is at the heart of the novel.
Jim Henderson reviews Leonora Carrington‘s The Hearing Trumpet.
Even in the face of the histrionic Royal Mail suspension of deliveries to Europe over Christmas, or Donald Trump’s claims about postal ballots leading to voting fraud in the U.S. election, a novel dedicated to the question of whether competition should be permitted for letters weighing less than 50 grams hardly seems evocative. And yet, Hjorth’s novel is a jolting tour de force impossible to put down, gleaming with philosophical insight and tenderness in the most unexpected places.
Denise Rose Hansen reviews Vigdis Hjorth‘s Long Live the Post Horn!
Tom Allenʼs ʻPreliminary Notes After Care Homesʼ touches on the idea that once upon a time moving into a care home might have been seen as entering a community. Now, he reflects, Care Homes are a microcosm of capitalist society; in which those citizens who are no longer productive have to use the capital built up over their working lives, embodied in their own homes, to pay for care. Allen adds that because of the increasing vulnerability of the ageing body to accident or internal failure, ʻthe care home is a place in which the senselessness of a certain notion of fairness, itself a historical relative of the illusionary logic of the age, is omnipresent and, as such, a care home is a place in which the prattle about dignity, work and earning are at their most intense and their most obviously false.ʼ
Bridget Penney reviews On Care edited by Rebecca Jagoe and Sharon Kivland.
McMullan has crafted an impressively taut, thoughtful novel from these exuberant materials. He writes with a muscular lyricism; the book’s moral gaze is both pitiless and ambivalent. The idea for the village’s great wall came to McMullan, a journalist, when he was teaching in rural China. In one small village, he found a building scrawled with the misdeeds of the community: a palimpsest of slights and sins. It was a relic of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, a communal purging of bourgeois sentiment.
Alex Diggins reviews The Last Good Man by Thomas McMullan.
When literature correctly strives to be gonorrhea of the throat, each book should burn till the chords melt. Sidewalk chalk in a storm as your magnum opus, an erasure more meaningful than birth. A little dribble in the void never killed anybody. The novella seeps from ileum to Iliad. Cavities keep congested with mythic creatures and quests.
David Kuhnlein reviews Sea of Glass by Rebecca Gransden.
Gladman’s work registers that “space as such,” whatever it is, is probably not the affectless cypher to structure but a structure already structured, “geometric or morphological.” Yet its implications are rangier than what might be summarized by a curator as those pertaining to “genre-bending.” Architectures makes to unravel the religious and industrial facing that is empty space. As such, the often pathetically ambivalent “post-ironic” spatially-charged genre of the installation is not just the spelling-out of a-s-s-e-m-b-l-a-g-e or c-u-l-t-u-r-a-l p-a-s-t-i-c-h-e across a gallery room.
Albe Harlow on Prose Architectures by Renee Gladman.
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