If all works of literature are haunted by the ideal forms of which they are but imperfect instantiations, then the blank book – as envisaged by Carrión – symbolises the refusal to compromise authorial vision.
When we take pictures of our children, do we really know what we are doing, or why? The contemporary parent records their child’s image with great frequency, often to the maximum degree afforded by technology. Inasmuch as the baby or child is an extension or externalization of the parent’s own self, these images might be seen as attempts to equate the production of a child with an artistic act. The task of the artist is to externalize his or her own self, to re-create that self in object form. A parent, presented with the object of the baby, might mistake the baby for an authored work. Equally, he or she might find their existence in an object outside themselves intolerable. In both cases the taking of a photograph is an attempt to transform the irreducibly personal value of the baby into something universal by proposing or offering up its reality. Yet what the image records is not so much the reality of the baby as that of the person looking at it. If the baby or child is a created work, it is one whose agenda remains a mystery to its creator.
Sea of Tranquility is an escape room of a book: a whodunnit, in a way, with one clear right answer. In that way, despite its plotlines about time travel, moon colonies, and airship terminals, it feels like a throwback to Mandel’s earlier work. It’s a simpler book, a neater book, than the two that preceded it. Written in Mandel’s past and ours, intertwining imagined past, present and future timelines, it somehow bears us deeper into the past and not the future. Time travel, after all, works in both directions.
Nafisi’s new work is a stunningly beautiful and perceptive illustration of how we rethink our lives by looking for the mysteries behind the fault lines that kept us imprisoned. She continues to circle this theme, often retelling stories, sometimes reimagining them in a different way from her other works. She isn’t being duplicitous with us, but rather attempting to find solid ground as the ghosts of her past continue to haunt her.
David Flusfeder is a semi-professional poker player, who knows all about the thrill of the gamble. In Luck, he bypasses the scientific harsh truth about randomness and probability and instead has written a book about the human side of luck, which he defines as “the operations of chance taken personally”.
Levy doesn’t delve too deeply into any individual story. But the overview serves as a useful starting point for comedy buffs wanting to learn more about each of these trailblazing comedians.