Books
India Lewis
China Room, Sunjeev Sahota’s third novel, is a familiar, ancestral tale: the story of Mehar, living in late 1929 in rural Punjab, is narrated alongside that of her unnamed descendant in 1999, who has grown up in England. Despite the hardships endured by the book's protagonists (arranged marriage and heroin withdrawal, respectively), it is a gentle, if not particularly gripping read. There is, however, a mystery to be solved, set up in the book's first line, when Mehar isn’t allowed to know which of the three brothers is her husband. Sahota explores this delicately, turning over and examining Read more ...
theartsdesk
Nearly a year has passed since George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police on 25 May. Nearly 200 have passed since the birth of “blackface minstrelsy” as a performance mode: white actors applying racial prosthetics to perform and make a mockery of black characters. In Blackface, an essential history of this racist performance tradition, which examines its legacy as well as its origins, scholar-activist Ayanna Thompson lays bare the logic that links the two events: “a filthy and vile thread” connecting performances of blackness with anti-black racism. The following is an excerpt from the Read more ...
Jessica Payn
Two years ago, I became preoccupied with beetroot. I didn’t want to eat it, particularly, or learn new ways to cook this crimson-purple veg. Instead I hunted down stories of the “beet-rave”, as it was once called (from the French la betterave), from an earlier time when rave was a root vegetable, and a “wild rave”, instead of a techno-fuelled, all-night dance party, was a horseradish. In his novel Jitterbug Perfume (1984), Tom Robbins describes the beetroot as “the most intense of vegetables”, a “deadly serious” root whose leaking liquid resembles blood. It was Rasputin’s favourite, he Read more ...
Jon Turney
Music and time each dwell inside the other. And the more you attend to musical sounds, the more complex their temporal entanglements become. Time structures music, rhythmically and in its implied narratives. From outside, we place it in biographical time, whether cradle songs, serenades to a lover or wakes. Then music sits in history, yet somehow also apart from it, the latest sounds prone to evoke links between sonic effects and emotion that feel inexpressibly ancient. More ancient still, when we muse on bird choruses, animal cries or the thousand mile songs of whales, human music seems to Read more ...
Sarah Collins
Almost a year ago, in the midst of the first national lockdown, The Sunday Times broke the news that Boris Johnson had failed to attend five consecutive Cobra meetings in the lead up to the coronavirus crisis. The article went viral, reaching 24 million people in the UK and becoming the most popular online piece in the history of the paper. It was clear that as people lost their freedoms and feared for the lives of their loved ones, the Prime Minister’s reportedly relaxed attitude to the pandemic had triggered public outrage.The authors of the article, Jonathan Calvert and George Read more ...
India Lewis
Fifty Sounds is translator Polly Barton’s first novel, conceived as part of Fitzcarraldo’s annual essay prize. The book begins with listed Japanese words or phrases (katekanas), translated into poetic English, setting the reader up for the central conceit of the book – vignettes each under the heading of one of these katekanas. These katakana introductions are elegant and often funny (for example: “koro-koro: the sound your teensy little identity makes as it goes spinning across the floor”), offering not just a literal translation but a whimsical one, weaving this into the proceeding text. Read more ...
Jessica Payn
“I think it happened to you, too, the first time you arrived.” So begins Andrea Bajani’s second novel (Se consideri le colpe, 2007), recently translated from Italian by Elizabeth Harris, with the narrator’s characteristic reserve. “You”, that pronoun at once intimate and confrontational. “It”, denoting an experience yet to be defined but which (tentatively) has already happened. Lorenzo is addressing his now dead mother as he arrives in a Romanian airport for her funeral: a country he has never visited, for a woman he has not seen since he was a young boy, not since she left him behind in Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The idea behind Tarzan Economics is, in its essence, that “if the vine we are holding onto is withering, we can have confidence to reach out for a new one.” This thesis expounded in Will Page’s highly engaging book is that the music industry “got there first”. It may have started out by getting things badly wrong when originally faced with the challenge of digital, but it then “worked out how to pivot and thrive.” And to grow again. The conclusion that Page draws from this chain of events is that the music industry – and also he – has lessons to teach other sectors. Media, finance, government Read more ...
theartsdesk
"Television and I grew up together." As a baby boomer born in 1947, Susan Bordo is roughly the same age as our beloved gogglebox, which began life as a broad box with a ten-inch screen, chunky and clunky and encased in wood. With the rapid changes in technology in the years since, "television", as Bordo points out, has become estranged from its material status. “In 2020, ‘television’ is what we watch, not the material object we watch it on.” Combining memoir with social and political history, her book is about our changing relationship with TV and the box's far-reaching consequences for our Read more ...
CP Hunter
Sam Mills’s writing includes the wondrously weird novel The Quiddity of Will Self, the semi-memoir Fragments of My Father, and Chauvo-Feminism (The Indigo Press), which was released in February 2021. Chauvo-Feminism is a non-fiction long-form essay in which Mills delves into the phenomenon of men who create a feminist public persona which does not translate into their private lives. Her own experiences are interspersed with the story of the #MeToo movement and other women’s publicly-shared stories in a way that amplifies the multitude of untold stories that unfold every day. Avoiding the neat Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
“This book is a journey of historical discovery, set out sequentially in order to convey a sense of what has changed over time.” Add to this sentence, the title of the work from which it is taken, The Art Museum in Modern Times, and you’ll probably have a reasonable sense of Charles Saumarez Smith’s latest book. Simple, effective – Smith presents us with a series of case studies of museums, placed in chronological order according to each’s unveiling. Following a brief introduction to the Traditional Museum (“bastions of intellectual and scholarly conservatism, dedicated to the understanding Read more ...
Liz Thomson
For the last couple of years, until we were so rudely interrupted, I’d been spending chunks of the year in New York, a city I’ve come to know well these past 25 years. I’d once found the idea of it intimidating, scary even. A migraine-inducing sensory overload. Once there I came to understand it as a collection of neighbourhoods, villages, some a little intimidating perhaps, and as a basically friendly city where people looked out for one another as they do (or do not) in London. Yes, there are people with whom you avoid eye contact but there are many more strangers with whom you chat, on the Read more ...