Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
16 March 2012 (UK)

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Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, a Turkish-language production directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, centres on a night-time search for a buried body in the Anatolian steppes. Ceylan’s film was co-winner of the Grand Prix at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival (alongside The Kid with a Bike), but unlike Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, which took the Palme d’Or, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is dialogue-driven. The medium of film is visual by its very nature, and it is from this quality that films like The Tree of Life derive their power – Ceylan’s work is an interesting contrast.

The film follows a search led by a murder suspect, Kenan, who has confessed to the killing of a friend. He conducts a party of officials – including police officers, the commissar and the doctor from the town where the murder took place, and an Ankaran prosecutor – on a quest to locate the corpse. Much to the commissar’s consternation, however, Kenan cannot recall where he buried his victim. His excuses are diverse: the homogenous landscape, night – even drunkenness at the time of the original murder.

As the party trails from spot to potential spot (pausing momentarily for food at the home of a village elder), the film’s action and depth emerges from the men’s talk. Their reflections range from the mundane to the profound: matters as casual as yoghurt or quitting smoking intermingle with speculation as to whether the prosecutor has prostate trouble – and with more sombre musings, too. The film takes on both death and politics: a line about refraining from the abuse of suspects so that Turkey can join the European Union takes on a degree of unintended humour in the light of the debt crisis. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is not propelled through its 157-minute duration by successive action scenes, but consists of accessible and realistically paced dialogue.

The central thread of the film goes beyond the search for a buried body to address universal feelings of guilt and regret. Over the course of the narrative, Prosecutor Nusret gradually relates the story of a woman’s inexplicable death – on the exact day that she had predicted it. The film unpicks Nusret’s intimate relationship with the event, one of many facets of narrative complication; equally, Kenan’s visualisation of the man he killed reveals further hidden layers of meaning.

The core themes of Once Upon a Time in Anatolia – sin and guilt – are brought into sharp relief by its poignant ending, when the search party has returned to the town, Keskin, by daylight. “It’s the kids who suffer most in the end,” Commisar Naci reflects. “It’s the kids who pay for the sins of adults.” This compelling and highly realistic film, seeded with Chekhovian allusions, speaks deeply to sin yet allows an act of grace in its final moments. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia’s lasting power resides in the intimate knowledge of small-town power dynamics brought to the production by Nuri Bilge Ceylan and his co-creatives, and in the quiet, commanding intelligence of its social vision.

Peter Anderson graduated with a DPhil in History from Jesus College, Oxford.

The U.S. National Archives hold more than 25 million photographs and 20,000 graphic images at their facilities in the Washington, D.C. area. A selection of photographs have been made available publicly on the U.S. National Archives’ Photostream.

Katherine Boo
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Slum
Forthcoming in the UK from Portobello Books Ltd, 2012
288 pages
ISBN 978-1846274497
£14.99

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Behind the Beautiful Forevers is a shining, disturbing testament to the lives of individuals living in anonymous desperation. Katherine Boo’s excellent book records the quotidian existence of the inhabitants of Annawadi — a small slum near Bombay’s luxury airports — in intimate and often loving detail.  She captures the spirit of a world where people dream of seeing a part of themselves endure beyond death: keeping the pieces of paper that prove ownership of their possessions like treasures in dirty plastic bags, defending them from destruction by rain and rot.

The book is meticulously researched and demonstrates acute insight into the culture and languages of India. Boo proves readers with a feast of detail. We know that the Husains eat Parle-G biscuits: the cheapest available at one rupee for a small pack. The dark-skinned thief, Kalu, loves to imitate Deepika Chopra in the Bollywood music, Om Shanti Om – a film in which a beautiful woman comes back to life to seek revenge for her unjust murder. Elsewhere in Behind the Beautiful Forevers, two tears fall down the face of Prakash, the most educated student in Annawadi, as he struggles to prepare for his final exams. These tiny observations combine to  illustrate the cultural and existential structures of the Annawadians’ lives. In an author’s note, Katherine Boo  professes her desire to seek out “the infrastructure of opportunity in this society”:  the news isn’t good.

Both the desire for permanence and the importance of memory emerge as repeated themes within the book. Sitting under roofs constructed of tarpaulin and plastic sheets, protected by cardboard walls – for the inhabitants of the slum Annawadi, permanence unsurprisingly seems like a promise of respect and security. The Husains, a Muslim family “the size of a cricket team”, dream of a permanent house in the suburbs; the age of the garbage sorter, Abdul, remains an unfixed mystery from the first page to the last – he could be sixteen, or nineteen, nobody knows. Yet Annawadians, like most people, want to rise above their own lives, and to be remembered: they want to know that they have made a mark on the world, beyond the mutability that these vignettes consistently suggest. Perhaps that is why they spoke to Boo.

The power of the narrative derives in part from what the book lacks: a solution. There are no recommendations, no policy points beyond the insistence that readers pay attention. Instead of disregarding the Annawadians’ capacity for morality, or canonising them as martyrs to the cause of globalization, Boo invites readers to admire the attempt to live in a world where the odds are impossible. It should be no surprise that the poor of Annawadi are human –  but it is surprising, nonetheless. In a public sphere that tends toward dichotomy in its attempt either to hail the poor as virtuous or to condemn them as damaged beyond repair, the book is at its most poignant (and most ferociously committed) when it seeks to understand and memorialize the irresolvable complexities of the Annawadians.

In an interview with the New York Times, Boo insisted that she intended no criticism of the Indian government, yet the book feels suffused with indictment. Policemen ask for bribes even more than Annawadians offer to pay them, which is often. The government system – its institutions intended for the assistance of the poor – is badly broken. “Social workers” and slumlords fluently transfer funds intended for social service projects into their own pockets.

The only character missing in the book is Boo herself. It is abundantly clear that Behind the Beautiful Forevers is about the experience of Annawadians, who almost seem to live and breathe in its pages. The book is a mirror reflecting a reality so harsh that I found myself looking for cracks in the story – for ways to deny its power. But the strength of the book lies in the inevitable conclusion: the story is true. It is a story of horrible circumstances, futile hope, and contradictory, beautiful people. Its truth is the book’s only argument.

Megan Robb is reading for a DPhil in Oriental Studies at Wolfson College, Oxford.

1. “Reality T. V. and the Flexible Future“, Jacobin: “… reality TV is better than the morosely Freudian period dramas everyone else in my demographic keeps talking about.”

2. “Obama Endorses: Good for Obama, Bad for Gay Marriage“, The Economist: “Millions of GOP voters who otherwise might have gradually reconciled themselves to gay marriage within the next few months will be held back by the ideological alignments created in this presidential campaign.”

3. “2012 Olympics: Kabul. Baghdad. London. Three to Avoid this Summer“, The Guardian: “The Olympics have become a festival of the global security industry, with a running and jumping contest as a sideshow. No one in government dares call a halt.”

4. “Poet Joshua Clover and 11 Students May Face Prison Time and $1 Million in Damages“, The Poetry Foundation: “The administration of UC Davis is holding poet and professor Joshua Clover and 11 students accountable for their alleged role in protests that led to the shutdown of a campus US Bank..”

5.”Remembering the Creative Legacy of Maurice Sendak, In His Own Words“, Co.Design: “I have nothing now but praise for my life. I’m not unhappy. I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can’t stop them. They leave me and I love them more.”

Marcello Carlin
The Blue in the Air
Zer0 Books, 2011
149 pages
ISBN 978-1846945960
£9.99

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The Blue in the Air is a collection of fifty posts from Marcello Carlin’s music blog of the same name. Originally published online between 2007 and 2008, they reflect a time that mingled economic crisis with Obama-inspired political optimism – while their author was himself transitioning from a post-mourning stage into a new relationship, following the death of his first partner. Carlin celebrates how the strange and wonderful words, beats, and tones of music can gently, steadily resonate with biographical and political rhythms. Each post takes a song, a performance, or even a radio drama, and through critical and structural analysis reveals how sonorities can embody current personal and social sensibilities, interweave shared cultural and personal memories – or simply speak for the music itself.

Cultural critique is at the forefront, driven by Carlin’s left-wing sympathies. His contemplative reading of Giggs’ “Tempa Tempa”, a hip-hop/grime song – which Carlin describes as London’s own “Hard Knock Life” – promises a glimpse of the dark reality of the victims of the credit crunch. In contrast, the post on Jay-Z’s performance of “Wonderwall” at Glastonbury 2008 reads as a stream of consciousness aroused by the eclectic radicalism Carlin perceives in the spectacle of an American Gangsta rapper covering a totem of Brit-rock. This eclecticism was a moment of true pop, resisting and inverting official state conditions – namely, the animosity between the UK and the US.

Carlin’s readings are not always made so explicit, however. They remain hidden, like subsurface analytical currents: this is what he means by “the blue in the air”. A sense of resurrection seeps through many of these analyses, as their author stands at the junction between old and new lives. The gradual new beginning that Carlin hears in American Music Club’s “Last Harbor” invokes  the one that he has had to endure: Mark Etzel’s question (“Are you gonna be my last harbor?”) has a personal resonance.

Carlin’s dedication to digging up and dusting off lost, forgotten and misunderstood songs is always explicit, however. He insists that such pieces deserve another chance: the aim is to make the reader embark on a personal search for the music, though the old venues of libraries and second-hand record shops have been superseded by easy Googling. With YouTube and Spotify providing immediate access to much obscure music, “digging” is now an activity confined to the most committed. Nonetheless, some of the music in the book is so rare that it is not available to stream online, and it is the greatness of these unheard pieces that Carlin wants to commemorate – whether we will ever hear it or not.

The success with which Carlin persuades us varies. Unless the music is allowed to speak for itself, the reasons underlying his claims that sundry decades-old songs deserved higher chart rankings than they actually received are often unclear. These arguments read as record collector’s criticism, equating value with age and abstruseness. The willingness to search for and listen to such music can be hard to muster. A number of posts refer to The Prisoner, a postmodern British television series from the late 1960s, and in Carlin’s analysis of “Alone On the Telephone” – a particularly bizarre song-rant attacking modernisation by one of the show’s actors, Patrick Cargill – we must imagine the music, for the song is unavailable online. A dedicated reader could track down the namechecked actors, but such demanding work risks alienating many.

Nonetheless, The Blue in the Air’s eclecticism guarantees that there is something in here for everyone, from 50s ballads and 60s avant-garde, to 80s rave and contemporary hip-hop. Despite the occasional aversion, the book offers proof that as long as we make, listen to, and engage with music, we have the power to change the world we live in.

Maria Witek is reading for a DPhil in Music at Wadham College, Oxford.

Katherine Fallon earned her MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence in 2006, and began taking photographs a couple of years ago. She has destroyed upwards of 10 cameras in that timespan and can’t be trusted with nice things. She lives in Philadelphia with her headstrong, half-feral dog, Onward.

Song Dong
Waste Not
15 February — 12 June 2012
The Barbican Centre
London

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The Curve Gallery at the Barbican is filled with 10,000 things belonging to a single family. Waste Not, the first major London exhibition by the Chinese artist Song Dong, is a very personal installation – but in remembering his own family’s story, his assemblage also helps to piece together parts of the twentieth century.

The meticulously arranged objects in Waste Not­, including shopping bags, cardboard boxes, flower pots, toys, clothes, and even the wooden frame of the old family house, are the opposite of grave goods. Instead of things buried and relinquished with the dead, these are objects carried and held on to by the living. They were collected over the course of fifty years by Song Dong’s mother, Zhao Xiangyuan; when her husband died in 2002 she could not bear to throw anything away and began to amass more and more.

The surfeit of objects in this large white space is overwhelming, but walking among them provokes a repeated shock of recognition. These things mark stages in a family’s life: the faded brittle plastic of children’s toys; the rows of shoes that get bigger in size. They also reveal quiet, domestic acts of resistance to totalitarianism, and illustrate the frugality which was a means of survival in Mao’s China: as in the stockpiled blocks of laundry soap, for example, which was hard to obtain. They show, too, globalisation’s creep, in the brand-names on the bottle-tops and empty packaging, and the cartoon characters on t-shirts and backpacks.

Waste Not was first presented in Beijing in 2005, but it is a quintessentially twentieth-century work. Its genesis begins with the Cultural Revolution in 1966 – also the year of Song Dong’s birth – but it suggests, at the same time, older photographs from other places: the piled-up shoes, spectacles, and wristwatches which served as visual witnesses of genocide to an aghast, post-Holocaust world in the 1940s. Leeds-based artist Antonia Stowe built on this idea in her installation reflecting on the Holocaust, 6 Million +, which has travelled around public spaces in the UK since 2006 and is made up of some six million buttons, one for every life.

Waste Not is inescapably poignant, but it is also endearingly absurd. It grew as much from the artist’s gently mocking exasperation with his mother’s eccentric habit, and his desire to help her out of it, as it did from an impulse to reify the larger political ideas with which it engages. Until her own death in 2009, Zhao Xiangyuan helped her son assemble the installation in the places it has visited, which include galleries in Berlin, New York, and San Francisco.

Waste Not is something of a departure for a conceptual artist who has elsewhere sought the most transient media for expression in performance art, video and photography. In Writing Time with Water (2005), he spent an hour in Times Square painting each minute on the pavement with a calligraphy brush dipped in water. But in Waste Not he is – to borrow Seamus Heaney’s words from ‘The Harvest Bow’ – “gleaning the unsaid off the palpable”, and allowing the onlooker to do the same. Although the old Please Do Not Touch rule applies in the Barbican, every palpable thing is eloquent.

Rosie Lavan is reading for a DPhil in English at St Anne’s College, Oxford.

Rob Coley and Dean Lockwood
Cloud Time: The Inception of the Future
Zero Books, 2012
£9.99
127 pages
ISBN: 978-1780990958

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Cloud computing is “the systematised virtualisation of data storage and access, the coalescence of power into an instantly available utility, ready for any eventuality”. It has long been the next big thing, its advent increasingly feasible and inexorable as Internet speeds surge. The phenomenon has attracted the inevitable cluster of cheerleaders, who have spread the good news with messianic fervour all the way from Silicon Valley shareholder meetings to that most glorified of business seminars, TED. While the financial crisis spelled the end of untrammelled and overweening capitalism, in the view of many, the Internet contains the seeds of a quiet evolution to a new and efficient “sharing economy”. In a new book, Cloud Time: The Inception of the Future, the sceptical intent of authors Rob Coley and Dean Lockwood comes as a most welcome antidote to this uncritical techno-utopianism. They lay bare the propensity of these new cyberspaces to structure the actions and interactions of their users. Ultimately, however, they fail to ground this analysis in sufficient detail, attempting instead to extend their insight to our present economy and politics as a whole.

There are several possible critiques of cloud computing. Concerns about data privacy are already well-developed, and worries about corporate enclosure are gathering momentum. Coley and Lockwood choose to elaborate a third avenue of disquiet: the way cloudspace structures the interactions of its participants. As we increasingly upload entire spheres of our activity to the cloud, more and more areas of our lives fall under this shaping influence.

Cloud Time employs the conceit of a video game world to illustrate the mode of control instantiated by cloud computing. The concept is familiar from Foucault. Whereas traditionally power has been understood as the capacity of one agent to prevent another agent from acting as she pleases, Foucault argued that in our society it has increasingly operated in the form not of preventing but of generating and channelling desires and projects in the agent. The rules of a video game cannot be seen merely as fetters on a pre-existing agent because the agent only exists in the video game’s world in virtue of those rules. The same point can be made with the laws of physics or the rules of chess: these norms simultaneously enable and steer the agent. Coley and Lockwood argue that the very creation of our identities in cyberspace is inseparable from a similar manipulation.

The thesis that our ability to navigate the cloud is subtly shaped and guided by those who have created and continue to own its structures is compelling. The trouble is that the authors spend little time exploring the precise mode in which this control takes place or grounding the ethical reasons why this might be troubling. They state, “You will be disappointed if you hope for a technical manual.” It soon becomes apparent that they intend to use cloud computing itself as a metaphor for a much wider phenomenon, an entire “cultural, social and political logic”, which they call cloud capitalism. Yet given that their analysis of cyberspace control was already an extension of theories of societal control developed by Foucault and Deleuze, there is little innovation in using cyberspace control as an illustration of the wider phenomenon. Sure enough, the reader learns little from the passages on the wider phenomenon of cloud capitalism that has not already been explored in the work of Mark Fisher or Slavoj Zizek.

Although their emulation of Zizekian rhapsody is dizzying and impressive, one feels it inhibits a truly incisive examination of the very real threat of the corporate colonisation of cyberspace. Just as with their preferred interpretation of Das Kapital—as a Victorian novel centred on the eponymous monstrous protagonist, “Capital”—this playful style, with trademark cult film and pop culture references, seems to imply a renunciation, an acceptance of the impossibility of resistance. Yet surely it is still possible to go beyond a lyrical meditation on our impending fate? Most disappointingly, the authors leave untouched the urgent question of what it is about Foucauldian control—in cyberspace or in politics—that merits our resistance. They condemn the manipulation inherent in the cloud business model. Yet, to return to the video game analogy, we may choose to accept the rules of the system in exchange for the freedom and pleasure it promises us. They might appeal to the disrespect of human dignity implicit in such manipulation, but they do not fully explore this. On the other hand, the worry might be contained in their prophesy of the inevitable boredom of a citizenry virtually granted their every wish. But it does not seem certain that a corporate system aware of this possibility would not solve this by reintroducing the sort of constraints that Coley and Lockwood feel are indispensable to a fulfilled life.

Furthermore, Cloud Time contains no practical suggestions as to how to overcome the impending situation, which seems somewhat defeatist; might it not be possible to create alternative cyberspaces, or even to seize control of the existing means of virtual production and implement democratically chosen and equitable structures with truly fulfilled human activity as their raison d’être? If the authors find this too hopeful, they neglect to show that cyberspace must inherently be constituted of exploitative structures.

Cloud Time‘s apparent promise of an anatomy of capitalist digitalisation does much to dismantle the current idyllic vision of the cloud. The authors, however, in seeking to develop their insight into a full dissection of our entire zeitgeist, are distracted both from exploring the detail of techno-economic exploitation and from offering even broad speculation into strategies of resistance.

Alexander Barker is reading for a DPhil in Political Theory at Lincoln College, Oxford University. He is a senior editor at the Oxonian Review.

Chad Harbach
The Art of Fielding
Fourth Estate, 2012
£16.99
450 pages
ISBN: 978-0007374441

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“Writing is exciting and baseball is like writing. | You can never tell with either how it will go | or what you will do.” So wrote Marianne Moore in “Baseball and Writing”. For Moore, the work of the writer and baseball player are analogous. They’re both willing to waste effort. They’re both prepared to be hard on themselves. They’re both attentive and must strive for precision. It’s a startling comparison, and makes an extraordinarily pertinent motto for Chad Harbach’s voluminous debut novel The Art of Fielding. We might even read Moore’s statement as a diagnosis of Harbach’s own condition: he worked on the novel for almost ten years. After these labours he perhaps surprisingly turned down a marginally higher manuscript bid in order to work with publishing house Little, Brown and Company and their executive vice president and editor Michael Pietsch, who worked with David Foster Wallace on Infinite Jest (1996). Like Wallace, Harbach uses long rhythmic lines and experiments in point of view. Indeed, his tragicomic style and dramatisation of academic, family, and sporting life link his debut to a long tradition of modern and postmodern American fiction, from H. G. Bissinger to Don DeLillo to Richard Ford.

Nonetheless The Art of Fielding has created its own space in the literary world and has become something of a phenomenon, gaining similar levels of critical and commercial success to Jonathan Franzen. And yet, unlike Franzen’s Freedom (2010), The Art of Fielding lacks an overt political agenda. Its covert message of resistance lies in its rhetoric. The novel starts and finishes with baseball, as we follow the lives of Westish College’s team, The Harpooners. Westish is a (fictional) liberal arts college in Wisconsin, set in an era of “roommates, beer pong and Salvation Army furniture”. The protagonist is shortstop Henry Skrimshander, “the baseball messiah”, “the must-see kid with the magic glove”; he is unnaturally talented and set for superstardom until he suddenly loses the ability to throw the ball. His struggle with self-doubt and its consequences provides the novel’s narrative; it also sparks tangential plot lines involving Henry’s friend and mentor Mike Schwartz, his roommate Owen Dunne, the college’s president Guert Affenlight, and Guert’s daughter Pella.

Henry takes his cues from a book of meditations called The Art of Fielding, written by his hero Hall of Fame shortstop Aparicio Rodriguez (another invention). Henry’s goal is to achieve a set of successive errorless games in order to surpass Rodriguez’s NCAA record. Errors, as Harbach informs us (and he is kind to those who may know little of the sport), are cruelly posted on a scoreboard for everyone to see, making it clear who has made the error. As Henry’s errorless streak increases, his good fortune multiplies and he is inundated by countless numbers of crazy offers from agents and scouts. But when he falters, his breakdown is agonizingly public.

The outlandish character names will already have intrigued the cetaceous-minded. These are the first of the novel’s sea of references to Melville and Moby-Dick. The “Art of Fielding” book within the book has more than just length in common with this ninteenth century predecessor. At Westish College there is a statue of Melville to commemorate his visit in the late 19th century. The college team is the Harpooners, its shortstop’s name is Skrimshander, its pitcher’s name is Starblind; and the team’s obsessive quest for championship takes on the trappings of Ahab’s search for the white whale. The comparisons with Melville’s masterpiece are far-reaching.

Henry’s attempts to do what he loves are interrupted by paralysing bouts of self-doubt after a routine throw injures a fellow teammate. He is haunted by a fear of messing up and starts over-thinking everything, obsessing over minute details and exhausting himself to correct the mistake. But one mistake leads to another, and another. Melville’s captain, Ahab, voices similar sentiments when he laments the continual flipping between monolithic faith and cerebral doubt. Ahab would rather move forward linearly in “unretracing gradations”; so would Henry. Harbach’s allusions to Moby Dick can, nonetheless, complicate the reading experience beyond easy decipherment and can seem out of joint with the novel’s familiar context of time and place.

This contradictory but constant preoccupation with the unachievable works its way into several of the characters’ stories. The purportedly intelligent Pella undermines her sense of casual privilege by dropping out of high school and racing into a dead-end marriage to an uptight older man. Similarly, her father, the school’s president, the charming and sophisticated Guert, is made to feel at once too old and too young by an unanticipated romance with Henry’s self-described “gay mulatto roommate”. And perhaps most importantly, Schwartz’s body is swiftly falling apart despite his young age, as are all of his “reasons for suffering”, whether the prospect of law school, his thesis, or his relationships with Henry and Pella. “He didn’t get into law school only because he hadn’t applied to any of the hundreds of schools that would have him.” But in such egocentric writing there is the danger of a peculiar hubris. Once the writer has committed himself to himself, and no one else, he runs the risk of writing for the writer’s sake. With this comes the possibility of denying that there is any world of genuine worth except the one the writer can create. Harbach alludes to this danger when he writes that “Each of us, deep down believes that the whole world issues from his own precious body, like images projected from a tiny slide onto an earth-sized screen. And then deeper down, each of us knows he’s wrong”. He catches himself in the act of trying to achieve a sort of heroic, even cosmic, insight; but he pulls back. It is this easing-up, this modesty, in Harbach’s writing that saves the characters, to use an American phrase, from being down pat.

The majority of The Art of Fielding focuses on Henry, since he provides the vehicle for Harbach’s allusiveness. While the allusions to Ahab generate some pity for his sufferings by placing him in the company of other tragic sufferers, the attitudinal thrust of the allusions is mainly pejorative. However, Henry should not be considered in isolation. The relationship between Henry and Schwartz is at the core of the novel and articulates its most serious themes. Some of these are more easily recognizable, most obviously a painful co-dependency that can afflict trainer and trainee; Henry exists as an extension of Schwartz: “Without Schwartz there was no Westish College. Without Schwartz, come to think of it, there was hardly even any Henry Skrimshander.” Henry doesn’t make a move without thinking of how Schwartz would want him to proceed. Yet Schwartz realizes that “it was a bad thing to do: to distance himself from Henry… because he couldn’t handle Henry’s success.” Schwartz has always wanted what Henry possesses, certifiable talent, “an art to call his own”, but knew that his ambition and his understanding outshined his talent.

Harbach’s talent or artfulness is one of minute detail, a gift for observation, for finding the exact words for some human experience or feeling. This attention to detail contributes to commentaries on a wide range of serious topics: intense friendship, betrayal, the loss of a talent, a strained parent-child relationship, and drug dependency. As the pages glide by, filled with the author’s fondness for both baseball and Moby-Dick, the realization of having to leave the world which Harbach has comfortably created sets in. It’s a feeling of isolation like that of batter versus pitcher, fielder versus ball, or sailors on a ship, solitary and lonely. And the same could be said for the act of writing. As with writing (and baseball) you can never tell how it will go, and it’s hard to tell whether Harbach will become another great “American Voice”. What is certain is that Harbach has the patience, skill, and discipline required for the lonely, obsessive quest to write great literature.

Hanna Bailey is reading for an LLB degree at King’s College, Aberdeen University.

Rachel Cusk
Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation
Faber and Faber, 2012
160 pages
£12.99
ISBN 978-0571277650

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Aftermath, Rachel Cusk’s account of divorcing her husband, presents itself as something other than an easily digestible narrative. Though she acknowledges that the artifice of “plot” offers a coping mechanism for the pain of such a violent event, Cusk is not interested in neutralising her trauma; such self-love does not interest her. Rather, she insists on examining her suffering in an attempt to make wider sense of it.

Like the Ancient Greek tragedians, whose works are referred to throughout, Cusk exposes the violent currents beneath the superficial calm of domestic life. As a working mother, Cusk had a lifestyle that was unique to her generation. However, she feels that second-wave feminists have failed to achieve their professed goal of correcting gender relations. Prior to her divorce, she identified strongly with a non-essentialist view of womanhood, famously articulated by Simone de Beauvoir, in which a woman is “made, not born”. But the birth of her children brought a change. After enduring the long “pilgrimage” of pregnancy, she began to feel that gender is not an ideological trick played on women but a matter of biology. She had a visceral feeling that the children were hers, that she made them. This shift in belief came into conflict with her decision to become a working mother, a choice that stripped her of her “primitive maternal right”. Her husband’s prominent role as the children’s primary carer gave him an advantage in the post-divorce custody battle. Sitting in her solicitor’s office, knowing that she has given up her right to custody, she still feels the possessive impulse of motherhood. She feels herself to be “enormous, rough-hewn, a maternal rock encrusted with ancient, ugly emotion”.

Though Cusk presents a convincing argument for her position, her writing on feminism is marred by her dramatic overstatement. While her analysis of her feelings is subtle and honest, her grandiose declarations border on the absurd. She writes, “I am not a feminist…[a] feminist is supposed to hate men. She scorns the physical and emotional servitude. She calls them the enemy”. Cusk is clearly angry, but one can’t help feeling that her anger is misdirected. To whom does this crude idea of feminism apply? Her definition of a feminist as a woman who hates men is too outlandish to be meaningful. Her analysis of the disappointing outcomes of 20th-century shifts in gender relations is trenchant, but it is too imprecise and extravagant to be entirely convincing. While other marriages break up under the strains of daily life, Cusk blames her divorce on the influence of feminism—an influence which can be retrospectively critiqued once she has acquired the raw knowledge of motherhood. Motherhood is central for Cusk: her eloquent description of it as a distinctly human experience empowers her argument. Unfortunately, Cusk treats all of her experiences with the same humourless certainty:

My husband believed that I had treated him monstrously. This belief of his couldn’t be shaken: his whole world depended on it.

In an infuriatingly hypocritical move, Cusk exhibits the blind self-assurance that she condemns in her husband. This contempt for her husband’s feelings results in a sub-textual suggestion that the strains that drove her marriage to divorce belong not to grand political movements such as feminism, but to the failures of empathy common in every relationship. Likewise, though Cusk claims to hate stories, her own is elaborately furnished with details that are employed to support her own point of view. A broken plate, for example, becomes symbolic of “a new reality”. Though Cusk is superb in her personal descriptions, her more banal devices buckle under the metaphoric weight which she loads on them: a menial trip to the dentist becomes a philosophical treatise on pain. She never doubts her own objectivity, so that, despite the clarity of her prose, Aftermath often subsides into suffocating solipsism. It is not the cult of motherhood that has primacy, but the cult of Cusk.

Cusk’s conviction that her writing can adequately convey her experiences forces the reader into a position of scepticism. There are moments of awkward bathos in which this feeling is particularly intense. On getting a bad haircut in Paris, Cusk asks whether it was a “transformation or a defacement.” Even a sympathetic reader might think this a melodramatic reaction. A sceptic would suggest that Cusk’s discontent lacks concrete analysis, that it speaks of the vague longing common to those whose every material need is met. Cusk asks piteously, “Why had I destroyed my home?” But although her writing veers between topics as diverse as feminism, the weather, and the perils of psychoanalysis, this central question remains unanswered. Perhaps the answer has less to do with gender relations, or even her husband, than Cusk realises. She describes how when married, she would lie in the dark questioning her identity:

[…] in the darkness, in the marital bed, I felt myself wheeling on the edge of a black chasm […] The reality of my room, my home, my life couldn’t seem to anchor me. I was frightened of dying, not because I loved life but because I couldn’t distinguish myself, couldn’t gather together as one entity this self whose existence posited the fact of non-existence.

This pervasive feeling of insecurity might account for her endless self-aggrandising; her “self” only feels secure when bolstered by overstatement. Observing parents in the park, she dismisses them as “well-organised heirs of Christian piety”. Even their safety-helmets provide a metonym for a deep-rooted domestic inanity. Though Cusk knows nothing of this family, she assimilates them into a story of the “ideal” Christian family, a mawkish myth that she bitterly disregards. Her insecurity is also evident in the totalizing impetus which dominates her narrative: there is nothing that she cannot anatomise and then marshal in support of her case. Despite her adamance that this is not a fictional narrative, but rather a form of life-writing, her style—so controlled, so fond of glinting metaphor—seems a forced and highly subjective interpretation of the aftermath of her marriage. Cusk’s husband, for instance, who is unwilling to contact her, becomes a central focus for this narrative control, glibly summed up in one of Cusk’s metaphors:

X talks. X is a talker. He is like a well sign-posted museum: it’s easy to find your way round, to see what he chooses to display.

But Cusk’s own writing is equally well signposted. In her exquisitely detailed metaphors, there is no room for surprise or difficulty. Can any descriptive device encompass an entire person? There is a discrepancy between the surface smoothness of Cusk’s prose and the chaotic “truth” which she wishes to evoke. Her writing is not propelled by analysis of the world around her, but by her own stylistic brilliance. Henry James wrote that if you transcribed a dream, you lost a reader. Cusk’s account of her life—so chilly and self-contained—might as well be a dream. It is just as beguiling and, to the reader, just as baffling.

Sorcha Kurien-Walsh is reading for a BA in English at St Catherine’s College, Oxford.