Writing

The too-familiar process by which the commercial mainstream comes to subsume always more peripheral cultural elements is one of Kunzru’s compositional black holes. The question of how to make art in conditions of stalled futurity is another.

It often seems like this is not a book in praise of excess so much as one deathly afraid of it. Everything truly excessive is neutralized, sublimated into rarefied high culture and righteous philosophy. Sometimes shit is worth just staying with.

There is a Beguine spirit in renunciation. But without a God for whom they can gouge their eyes out, Nicholson’s speakers become not separate from the world, but marked by it. They let it in with a private sense that they may not really be of it.

In revisionist feminist art and literary histories, a premium is placed on the young, suicidal woman

These are in many ways Marxist novels, or at least grounded in Marxist critiques of what the wage and bourgeois society do to the human soul. Labor and land are decisive forces on these characters. They squat in inherited apartments or drift on boats.

Maksymchuk’s words accrue a mountain of humanity in the ends of inhumanity. Ascend it; peer over language’s walls. Can her poetics actually cross them all?

Kinsky maintains that film is a contact sport: not simply fingertips feeding celluloid through a projector (though this is detailed often and affectionately), but also eyes carrying images like palmfuls of water

I finished The Time of Cherries on a severely delayed Amtrak train, at the very moment when I felt something akin to Roig’s “chaos of hopelessness.” The summer was off-kilter, with an endless deluge of “unprecedented events” playing out on newsfeeds and televisions. Flashes of abnormality, lighting up phones, tickering across widescreens, punctuated the dullness of long, excruciatingly hot days.

It is left unclear, intentionally, where the translation of imagination ends and the translation of language begins. Instead, from the Portuguese novel, we learn that the English narrator is unreliable only in the sense that she is a writer, tasked with the impossible undertaking that is replicating experience.

We understand, through the haze of her so extremely un-Cusk-like uncertainty, exactly why she turns to both gender and visuality in the two novels she’s written since. She is looking for a way out.