The danger is that, with overreliance on automated decision-making systems, there will be no need for thinking (and perpetually rethinking) justice either in its general outlines or in its application to particular cases. Computerized calculation will take the place of deliberation and will be responsible for further concealing the unjust intentions programmed into the “algorithms of justice.” And few things are more harmful to our vital ability to seek the meaning of the world and of our place in it than that.
Then I started using a wheelchair. Suddenly, stairs became a barrier that prevented me from getting from here to there. One step was often enough to stop me in my tracks. It turns out that when you start using a wheelchair, you quickly realize that there are a lot of staircases and steps in our world—and a lot of broken (or nonexistent) elevators and ramps.
“If we don’t see ourselves in the writing, then it’s not inviting to us.”
Once you start realizing how many stairs there are stopping you in real life, it becomes impossible not to notice them existing in the sci-fi you adore. Turns out they’re everywhere, in all of our sci-fi. Whether it’s decades-old or shiny and brand-new, our sci-fi imitates a real-world reliance on steps and stairs in our architecture.
As a narrative about the restoration of the status quo, the detective story parallels the situation engendered by the War. Like the crime that sets the detective story going, the War was an intrusion into what must—in juxtaposition with all the bloodshed, loss, and devastation—have seemed like an idyllic past. One wants to reclaim it, to set the upheaval of the War aside and go back to those peaceful times. One can never really go back, of course—the world after the War was different from the world before—but it was peace again, at least . . . Or was it? There was still that lingering desire to see the destructive intrusion defeated and the world made right again.
The annals of literature are packed with writers who also practiced medicine: Anton Chekhov, Arthur Conan Doyle, William Carlos Williams, John Keats, William Somerset Maugham, and on and on. As doctors, they saw patients at their most vulnerable, and their medical training gave them a keen eye for observing people and what makes them tick.
But if studying medicine is good training for literature, could studying literature also be good training for medicine? A new paper in Literature and Medicine, “Showing That Medical Ethics Cases Can Miss the Point,” argues yes. In particular, it proposes that certain literary exercises, like rewriting short stories that involve ethical dilemmas, can expand doctors’ worldviews and make them more attuned to the dilemmas real patients face.
In introductory studio art classes students are often assigned a negative-space drawing—that is, they are asked to draw everything surrounding a figure, filling up the page, until the blank shape of the figure emerges. This has been Rachel Cusk’s technique in her last trio of novels—a trio referred to appropriately as the Outline trilogy—and it is a little puzzling that more people haven’t thought to write novels in this manner before. Perhaps we go to fiction for the solitary inner life of one character and her actions against the confining tenets and structures of her society (though Cusk’s trilogy manages this as well) rather than for everything surrounding her—in this case, linked and paraphrased soliloquies of secondary, even tertiary, characters upstaging and downstaging the ostensible protagonist. This is not a cinematic way of writing a novel but it is theatrical, with sudden arias and contiguous monologues reminiscent of the plays of Brian Friel.
You could read The Third Hotel as an ode to watching. You could read it as a fever dream, a horror movie, a love letter to film theory or Cuba or women who keep secrets. The Third Hotel is a novel that operates in symbols and layers, which means you can read it however you like. There's no one ending, no right answer, and as a result, it will take away your internal compass. It will unmoor you, send you wobbling around your house in a haze. It will slide some eels under your skin. My recommendation? Let it. We can all stand to learn some new truths.
But it is the food of the Levant — particularly Lebanon and Syria — for which the book reserves the greatest affection, with references to the grilled Syrian kibbe that Helou ate during childhood visits to her aunt’s house in the town of Majd al-Helou, and a sumac version she ate with friends in Aleppo’s Old City.