One amazing thing about language is the sheer fluidity with which it allows us to manage such everyday episodes of joining forces and parting ways. It is literally the most versatile brain-to-brain interface we have: a nimble, negotiable system that enables people with separate bodies to achieve joint agency without giving up behavioural flexibility and social accountability. So before we throw out language because of its supposedly low data rate, let’s look a bit more closely at the ways in which it helps us calibrate minds, coordinate bodies and distribute agency.
Weeks after her death I was rummaging through her email, looking for some evidence that she had lied to me. That she had conveyed hope about a hopeless condition. That the evidence of the disease was worse than I imagined. As if a chart could explain what I had seen for myself but still chose to deny.
In an age where almost no one writes letters, this collection is a stand-in for a personal, entertaining and generous correspondence. Is this a way of saying Kingsolver is not a poet? Absolutely not. As a novelist, she is a smart craftswoman, at ease with the grand scale, and here proves herself a committed miniaturist, innovative with the shape of poems, at home with a villanelle and with a particular flair for last lines that concisely turn the tables.
Like Marisha Pessl and Rivka Galchen, Hofmann knows how to create intricate illusions of certainty in the midst of derangement. The result is a rare novel that encourages you to read as though your sanity depends on it — just a little further, just a little faster. It’s an unsettling simulation of living in a state that denies basic facts and perpetuates the most inane claims.
Every Bone A Prayer, the slipstream — that liminal combination of the literary and the fantastical — debut novel written by a survivor of child sexual abuse, bears within its pages striking beauty and strangeness in equal measure.
Much earlier in the story, Betsy and Nancy and their mother go on a cross-country road trip. At a Super 8 in New Mexico, Nancy and their mother — a fascinating figure, vulnerable and cruel — bond over their struggles with mental illness; the mother eventually commits suicide too. That night, Nancy bestows upon her sister a nickname that reverberates across this memoir: “Lucky Betsy.” What does it mean to be lucky, to be spared, when such luck carries with it the burden of bearing witness? In the end, Bonner is the only one who can tell this story, because she is the only one who survives it.
The day my body caught fire
the woodland darkened. The horizon
was a sea of maids, rushing to piece me