As a twentysomething, I’ve learned that growing out of things is natural. For so long I resisted that part of growth, because I thought it meant that in order to become an adult I had to let go of everything that I loved as a child. But that’s not true: the things we love as children—books, movies, characters, even stuffed animals—tend to shape us as people in pivotal ways, so there’s definitely no need to discard them because someone told you that’s what growing up is. However, sometimes we can’t always avoid the fact that we’ve grown out of something: people, places, mindsets or, most depressingly, books.
The only way to avoid rot is to be proactive: check every apple, every tree. At the first sight of something amiss—a bruise or broken skin, a sunken place—toss that apple out, but don’t stop there. Scrub all the others and monitor them closely, but know that it’s likely already too late. Better to trim and burn the infected branch, or even the whole tree.
For dancers, as for most people, it’s been a rough couple of months. But how do you wrap your head around the end of your dancing career when there is no last dance?
After months of lockdown, political unrest and the inescapable threat of environmental collapse, some of us long for a glimpse of a world other than our own. Readers can find one in John Garth’s “The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien,” a fascinating, gorgeously illustrated and thought-provoking examination of the landscapes, cities and architecture that inspired Tolkien during his lifelong creation of Middle-earth.
A prolific writer, Neuman – born in Argentina, now based in Granada – delights in language and linguistic ambiguity. In Fracture, he explores the fragmented nature of memory, emotional scars, a city’s wounds after a disaster and the cracks in a relationship caused by cultural difference. He draws profound parallels between collective traumas – Japan’s bombing, Vietnam in 1968, Argentina’s “disappeared”, Chernobyl and the 2004 Madrid train attacks. Recalling Japan’s enforced silence in the war’s aftermath, Yoshie’s Argentinian girlfriend, Mariela, ponders: “Maybe the most brutal thing is not that you were bombed. Most brutal of all is that they don’t even allow you to tell people that you’ve been bombed. During the dictatorship here they would kill one of your children and you couldn’t tell anyone.”
One of the worst things about being 17 is the gulf between how much you feel and how little you know. You mistake your nascent power — sexual power, disruptive power — for real power. You are angry, passionate, misunderstood, restless for some amorphous thing you cannot define.
The adults in your life either ignore you or, in the case of Margot Louve, the narrator of Sanaë Lemoine’s gorgeous debut novel, “The Margot Affair,” make grand diagnostic pronouncements that amount to misdirection.
“Spirit Run” is a narrative deeply rooted in the body, both as a singular organism and a part of humanity’s whole. It ambitiously conveys how complex the relationship between body, land, spirit and groups of people can be.
Amazing to feed misery like this, and so
Selfish: sitting there, in a crowded park,
A book on his lap the ghost of the book