It’s that livingness that crawls through the language, whatever language we can find to describe these encounters which are also happening, John Clare reminds us, in whatever constitutes bug-thought and bug-language, “whisperingly / too fine for us to hear.”
Where it counts, we are perfectly able to understand what nature has to say; the problem is, we choose not to. As incredible as it would be to have a conversation with another species, we ought to listen better to what they are already telling us.
With my mouth agape, Miyaguni – a Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) practitioner and Ryukyuan chef – gives my tongue a long look before drawing its likeness on a whiteboard and offering a prescription: "More cacao at night, honey in the morning and more butter," she concludes, noting it will help improve my blood circulation and dry skin.
I didn't come to Okinawa for a diagnosis per se, but in many ways, it was my taste buds that led me to Miyaguni's kitchen. I had been hoping to learn more about the island's elusive and indigenous Ryukyuan cuisine, which can be traced back to the 12th Century when the Ryukyu Islands began trading with other East Asian states.
What propels Flashlight is a more ambient sense that not everything is as it seems, enhanced by an unnerving series of doubles and echoes. Choi seems to be exploring, if subtly, the limitless number of paths a person can take, the manifold consequences of choices that seem inconsequential, the ways interpersonal disputes can widen into irretrievable losses, the awkward intersections of agency and fate: If only this, if not for that. The book’s many omissions are challenging at times. But Choi is a writer who can be trusted to have a plan, and she sews the narrative up with a conclusion that’s almost impossibly heartbreaking — about which the less said the better. Some things you can see coming from miles away. But life, we’re reminded, retains its ability to surprise.
A Möbius strip is a length of any material joined into a loop with a half twist. It’s an uncanny shape, common and obvious, easily created and yet awkward to describe geometrically. For literary purposes, a Möbius is interesting because there’s intricate structure and constraint but no ending. It goes around again, mirrored with a twist. Lacey’s book takes this literally, the text printed from both ends, with memoir and fiction joined in the middle. Twin stories experiment with plotlessness and irresolution, while remaining aware of the way fiction attaches itself to linear plot and reverts to romance and quest. Characters find and lose love, find and lose meaning.
Shibboleth has already been greeted with an unusual degree of admiration and acclaim for a first book, and its author has been interviewed in GQ for an article exploring the gender gap in fiction. However, the pleasures of this fine novel are far from tokenistic: somewhat ironically, given that its narrative revolves around the way in which contemporary university education has become mired in the most blinkered and repressive forms of tokenism, and that only the strongest-willed can resist the siren call of “fitting in”.
Welcome to Oxford University in the era of identity politics, where students discuss “lived experience”, acknowledge their “moral complicity” and pontificate about ways to enact “systemic change”. The spearheads of these discussions have names like Annunziata Rees-Mogg and went to boarding school, except they’re not Tories, they’re liberals with right-on opinions about decolonising the curriculum.
Thomas Peermohamed Lambert’s debut novel Shibboleth is an enjoyable satire of such ideologues, cloistered in this echoiest of echo chambers.
Tunnels, then, is an anti-essentialist text, one that insists upon a multiplicity of truths. This multiplicity is what gives the novel its liberatory power, for Tunnels is at every turn subversive, revolutionary, and antiauthoritarian.
To attempt a biography of a biography is a fresh venture. James Joyce, a life of the innovative Irish novelist who died in 1941, was published to international acclaim in 1959. The validity of its findings, and the prestige of its author, Richard Ellmann, have lasted. In Ellmann’s Joyce, Zachary Leader follows the making of James Joyce with empathy for Ellmann, as well as his book and its subject. Above all, Leader, himself the biographer of Saul Bellow, does justice to Ellmann’s feats of research, most strikingly by persuading a Joyce contact, Maria Jolas, not to divulge her suitcase of papers to Joyce’s son, Giorgio, who would have taken possession and shut the door.