Category: Uncategorised
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An Alsatian perceives a disembodied hand and bites it. Whilst staying in the hospital, Flora – a metallurgist visiting family in Mexico – befriends older German woman Wilhelmina, a collector of zoetropes and magic lanterns. Thus begins the story of The Shadow of the Object, a strange book made up of short non-chapters (no chapters…
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“She believed she was no worse and no better than most people and that we’re all equally exceptional and equally doomed.” When my husband saw me reading this book the other day, he said: I like books with that sort of cover – they seem classy. Which is interesting because the very first thing I…
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In some ways, Black Bag feels like a book of one-liners, as if I’m watching stand-up comedy. I don’t hate it. “I have measured out my life in coffees I can’t afford,” says our narrator on page 2. “Preach, brother” I wrote in my reading notes. The story follows a mostly-out-of-work actor (unnamed) as he…
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I can’t pretend: I didn’t choose these two books for any particular reason other than I was lent them both at the same time. But a comparison of them struck me as inescapable, so here we are. Both are stories of “staying on”, in a sense. Staying On, both set in and written in the…
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“‘It must be scary to be here on your own.’ ‘It’s scary to age alone.’ ‘It’s scary to be young alone.’ ‘We are all ultimately alone.’” When a book begins with a whole-ass family tree, you know it’s going to be something of an epic. And this epic took me so long to wade through…
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“Sometimes, the unjustly downtrodden took up arms and fierce miens, but equally often they turned the other cheek, studied harder, camouflaged themselves ever more behind obedience and merit and bided their time, believing against all evidence that the future would bring something better, for them if for nobody else. He tried to be the second…
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“The snow had changed things. They were in the world differently now, people understood that.” I have always found that there is a magical quality about snow: it creates a liminal space out of the ordinary where everything stops, and somehow, there, life happens. People come together or are pushed apart. Eric and Irene, Rita…
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“I asked her: ‘But why are they here?’ To which the answer was the Big Bang, which was not an answer, because the Question of Questions wasn’t ‘Why are there stars in the sky?’ but rather ‘Why is anything anywhere?’” One Boat is a book that deals with Big Questions. A bereaved woman retraces her…
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“They needed each other to bear witness, because the rest of the world didn’t.” Thus begins the story of Yeva and her extremely endangered left-shelled snail companion, Lefty. (Did you know that snails have a ‘handedness’? Well, now you do.) Yeva travels round Ukraine in a mobile lab trailer, attempting to rescue and find mating…
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“People always talked about having children as an event, as a thing that took place, they forgot that not having children was also something that took place, that is to say it wasn’t a question of absence, a question of lack, it had its own presence in the world, it was its own event.” The…
