Tag
Trauma
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Mute Compulsion
The trauma plot and the slut-shaming dossier are actually parallel formations, reveals “The Guest.”
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Sexuality, Counterfactually
Larry Kramer’s The American People, Volume 1: Search for My Heart is not all that interested in the history of sexuality. At first glance this might seem an odd assertion to make about a novel that …
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Modiano’s Memoryscapes
Patrick Modiano’s reputation as a writer of wartime Paris was sealed in 2014 by the Nobel Prize, which recognized him “for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies …”
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The Stranger’s Voice
The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s riveting debut novel, is a chronicle of war wrapped in a spy thriller and tucked inside a confession. It is also a political satire, a send-up of Hollywood, and a scathing critique of mid-20th-century Orientalism. Nguyen juggles genres like so many flying AK-47s, and to dazzling, often hilarious effect. At…
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China at World’s End
In a galaxy far away, but close enough, an intelligent alien civilization finally realizes that its planet orbits around three suns instead of one. They face the classic three-body problem of physics: like the movement of any three objects in space held by each other’s gravitational pull, the movements of these suns defy prediction. Sometimes…
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Love and Death in Indian Country
At its core, David Treuer’s latest novel is a tale of unrequited love and random violence. The stuff of melodrama, to be sure, but in Treuer’s skillful, multi-vocal telling, neither love nor death appears sensational or simple. Treuer, an Ojibwa writer from northern Minnesota, is the author of three other novels, a controversial work of…
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The Body Always Remembers
In a recent article in the Atlantic, Leslie Jamison discusses the memoirist’s responsibility to investigate the events of his or her past on the page rather than merely confess to them.1 She writes, “This notion of investigation offers an alternative to confession … To put the ‘I’ to work this way invites a different intimacy—not…
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Kim Thúy: A Way with Words
Over the past five years, Kim Thúy has become one of the best known and most celebrated francophone writers of the Vietnamese diaspora. Born in 1968, Thúy fled Vietnam by boat at the age of 10. After four months in a Malaysian refugee camp, she and her family immigrated to Quebec, where Thúy came to…
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Caught in the Game
The Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh devotes just over a minute of his documentary, The Missing Picture (released in the US in March), to the work of Ang Saroeung, a Khmer Rouge cameraman who filmed the fields of Democratic Kampuchea as they were—barren—and the glorious “new people” of the nation as they were—starving and devastated. When…
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Beautiful Disaster
Hurricane Sandy, like many disasters today, was a media event. Striking images flashed across screens. The skyline divided into light and dark. Small groups of people huddled around power strips, vying to charge their phones and laptops. A photographer paused astride a bicycle in a deserted street. Uneven media coverage matched the uneven development of…
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Dream Girls
Hilton Als’s White Girls is a disorienting book. If traditional biography aspires to capture the person behind the scrim of myth, Als prefers to linger on the scrim itself—the fantasy, the persona, the aura of celebrity—the fiction. His essay on Truman Capote focuses on the writer’s public image, beginning with the famous book-jacket photo of…
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The North Is the Dark Place
“The North is the dark place.” The first words of The Daylight Gate will not be surprising to readers familiar with Jeanette Winterson’s gothic upbringing in the north of England (200 Water Street, Accrington, Lancashire, to be precise). In both her brilliant debut novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), and her recent memoir,…
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Sentient Instruments
Things had been tough since Dee got back from Iraq. She and her husband were sleeping on opposite sides of the bed. “I’m sorry you’re not getting laid,” she snapped at him, “but I’m still seeing my buddies get killed in my head!” One night, they sat down to watch Transformers with their three-year-old daughter. As…
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Periphery to Periphery
Paris, New York, and London: these are the world literary capitals that have historically attracted and nurtured aspiring artists, who in turn have mythologized such cities by lovingly evoking them in their work.1 literature.” The World Republic of Letters, translated by M. B. DeBevoise (Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 24–30. ] But after so many repeat…
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Less Vital Phenomena
A recent New York Times profile of Anthony Marra, the author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, notes that “until the Boston Marathon bombings most Americans paid little attention to Chechnya.”1 Though Marra, whose novel is set against the backdrop of the Chechen Wars, is clearly an exception to this generalization, variations on the same…
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Animal Feelings
We read stories of how, after losing their companions, dogs and bunnies refuse to eat; ducks and horses exhibit nervousness and social anxiety; dolphins strand themselves …
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Reflecting Absence: An Interview with Michael Arad
Michael Arad’s winning design for the World Trade Center Memorial has created a landmark for New York City and for design. “Reflecting Absence,” the theme and title of Arad’s winning entry, raises questions about loss and memory, but also about bringing life to city streets. In conversation with Harel Shapira, Arad discusses the democratic uses…
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Up from the Shadows
“Aren’t archives supposed to be forever? Well, forever’s a meaningless concept in Asia. Here, only the present is eternal.” So we read early on in Sandi Tan’s debut novel, The Black Isle, a supernatural romance that spans 1920s Shanghai, a World War II–era South Sea island, and modern-day Japan. The novel opens in 2010 Tokyo…
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To Lose Everything (To War)
“What is it like to lose everything?” the young protagonist of Stephen Dau’s first novel, The Book of Jonas, is asked again and again by those hoping to fathom his experience of losing his entire family and village, in an unnamed Muslim country, to an American attack. And one day, writes Dau, “sitting in plastic…
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Landscape with Corpses
Pat Barker’s Toby’s Room is a stunning and disturbing novel of and about nightmares. Early on, the protagonist, Elinor Brooke, slashes off her hair in an act of vengeance against her femininity, then falls asleep: “she dreamt she was on her knees in a corner of the room, trying to vomit without attracting the attention…
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Memoir 2.0; or, Confession Gone Wild
Wild is Cheryl Strayed’s first confessional memoir—unless, of course, you count her name. As Strayed recalls about a third of the way through Wild, she authored that briefest of autobiographies on a set of no-fault divorce papers in 1994. Obsessed by the blank line where she was to write her new name, she toyed with…
