We live everyday on the brink of the abyss. Artists feel this. They smell darkness, inhale light. In what may be the oldest Greek myth of the gods, even Zeus himself, the almighty, journeys to the great goddess, Night, and asks her: What should I do? After their meeting, he recreates the world anew. Night is our most ancient councilor. In night, we dream. In dreams, we see reality in true tokens of its strangeness, its wonder, terror, and grandeur. “In art,” says Makoto Fujumura, “we do not ‘obliterate the darkness;’ art is an attempt to the define the boundaries of the darkness.”
What future do we face? What future do we want? What must we do to get there?
These three questions preoccupy us all. We can’t predict the future. However, we can imagine it and even design it; no outcome is predetermined and, as cognitive human beings, we retain the agency to shape the world we want. Perhaps most critically, we can also prepare for the future, by confronting both the risks that we can mitigate and the things that will surprise us. As the most effective conduits for ideas, narratives have the unique power to help us determine what’s going on, what lies ahead, and what needs to be done.
Sara Baume’s Seven Steeples is a tale told through absence. Her third novel – Baume’s debut, Spill Simmer Falter Wither, won the prestigious Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize – is a love story. But it’s a love story clipped of cliché: there’s no Richard Curtis meet-cute, no unhinged exes orbiting malevolently, little interiority and less conflict.
Longtime Alaskans have watched our glaciers recede as well, perhaps not as closely as Wadham does, but we see it in real time. “Ice Rivers” offers an explanation of what we are witnessing, why it is happening, and what we are losing. The success of Wadham’s book is her ability to feel this loss on a personal level, and to convey to us why we all should.
This book fascinates, illuminates and horrifies in equal measure, yet never falls into the trap of sensationalism or voyeurism. It’s an elegant examination of how the act of murder uncovers truths society never wants to confront.
Gardens knit us into the cycles of life: every winter is a preparation for more permanent losses, every spring a reminder of the possibility for renewal ahead. Lulah Ellender began writing Grounding after her mother’s death; sorting through the family home, she found a diary that her mother kept recording the rhythms of her gardening year and this becomes a guide for her own engagement with her garden. Ellender realises that her garden – as a physical space and as a way of being – represents a point of communion with her mother, a way of keeping in touch with her via the mediums of plants and flowers. “Her tasks are my tasks now,” she writes.
Some people break into show business; others burst. Like her famous character on “Saturday Night Live,” the nervous Catholic schoolgirl Mary Katherine Gallagher, Molly Shannon was more of a battering ram, laying siege to the false-fronted structures of Hollywood with blunt, repetitive force. When you reach the part in her new memoir, “Hello, Molly!,” where the fortresses finally crumble for her, you want to get out the pom-poms and cheer.