The story of human history is often told as one of a desperate struggle for survival, dominated by war and conquest, plagues and empires. But it could perhaps be narrated just as well through the quieter language of color.
Our species has been finding ways to color the world around us for as long as we’ve existed. Our nearest ancient relatives, Neanderthals, painted cave walls in Spain at least 60,000 years ago using red ochre, a naturally occurring mineral dug from the earth. Even older artifacts suggest that Neanderthals may have been using red ochre as a pigment as far back as 250,000 years ago. Since then, color-making has followed humans everywhere, from the brilliant blues of ancient Egypt to the beguiling purples of China’s Han dynasty.
Blue whales are not only the world’s largest animals, over 75 feet long and weighing around 300,000 pounds; they are the world’s loudest, whose 180-decibel songs—as loud as a jet plane—can be heard 500 miles away by properly-attuned ears. (If it seems strange that their songs are so loud yet imperceptible to us, consider that our ears barely register 100-decibel dog whistles.) But now their voices have inexplicably shifted from bass to basso profundo, Elvis to Barry White. And that shift is consistent around the world—even though the local anthems are not.
In his 1995 essay Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Jacques Derrida describes the archive as “a system or a synchrony in which all the elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration.” “In an archive,” he continues, “there should not be any absolute dissociation, any heterogeneity or secret […] [T]his can only have grave consequences for a theory of the archive, as well as for its institutional implementation.” Chilean author Nona Fernández’s 2013 novel Space Invaders, released in Natasha Wimmer’s English translation by Graywolf Press in the United States in 2019 and published in the United Kingdom this July by Daunt Books, operates on the cusp of archival collapse. It is about the spectral voices that haunt official history — a taking into account of the forgetfulness and erasure that are both a condition of the archive and a potential source of its undoing.
Marigold and Rose can be devoured in a single sitting, and that’s probably the best way to enter its tonal world, which is strangely hypnotic, in part because the mood never swings to violent intensity, and in part because of the orderly rhythms of Glück’s prose. Ten short chapters tell us – though not in exact chronological order – about the first year in the life of twin girls, the eponymous Marigold and Rose. During this period their grandmother dies, their mother experiments with going back to work, and they are “distracted, like all babies, by feelings of triumph. First crawling, then walking and climbing, then talking.”
The real Tokyo, as any denizen of the world’s most populous metropolis knows, is found in the smallest of spaces. Japan’s capital is not a city of grand arterial boulevards. Its lifeblood flows instead through tangles of narrow alleys, up the stairs of slim buildings and into tiny shops and cramped eateries.
Take Nonbei Yokocho, or Drunkard’s Alley, a charmingly defiant cluster of watering holes in the shadow of Shibuya railway station. The average size of the 38 establishments is just under five square metres, notes “Emergent Tokyo”, a new book by Jorge Almazán, an architect, and his colleagues at Keio University. They nominate Tokyo as a model of a liveable megacity and explore its workings—and in so doing show how perceptions of it have evolved.