MixedPloughsharesCaleb Azumah Nelson similarly finds form in emotional devastation. Centered around a romance between two young Black British artists, the novel’s unnamed second-person narrator bleeds himself dry on the page, expressing his desire and suffering with desperate clarity ... The narrator wants to dissolve himself in his partner’s love, but systemic forces prevent such a simple escape. Amid pervasive police profiling and racial violence, he knows that the path to freedom entails embracing his Blackness and subverting his masculine conditioning, the latter of which demands he bottle up his trauma. Although falling in love seems to offer temporary salvation, the novel argues that some scars need more than just domestic partnership to heal ... But in a book brimming with brilliant ideas and charming interiority, Open Water struggles to temper its lyricism and narrative ambitions, resulting in a captivating if not uneven read. The narrator tends to announce his emotions exactly as they are ... It can thus be difficult to distinguish the sublime from the sappy, the profound from the pedantic. And in a novel where there is no shortage of profundity, such overwriting creates a dissonance between what the author wants the reader to feel and what the reader may have been induced to feel without such specific instruction. The melodrama zaps otherwise searing moments of emotional weight ... Open Water is a moving novel that celebrates Black art and explores generational trauma.
Leonora Carrington
RavePloughsharesIn The Hearing Trumpet , Carrington leans into her starkest eccentricities, depicting the subversive power of womanhood with more imaginative zeal than almost any other 20th century novelist ... Much of Carrington’s humor follows this formula: a banal setup with an absurd punchline, or vice versa. But Marian and Carmella’s humor also emanates from their rejection of the rational world—and the rational world’s rejection of them. Unapologetically idiosyncratic, their peculiarities consistently clash with their surroundings, which is why their eccentrics are so intimately linked with age ... Carrington explores what Simone de Beauvoir called \'the fundamental source of women’s oppression,\' i.e., the historical, social, and institutional othering of female bodies that precludes any genuine expression of individuality ... These events unfold in a bizarre haste, yet Carrington somehow shoehorns the madness into a slew of intriguing philosophical questions: Is reality malleable? From where do our moral foundations arise? How can we transcend repressive power structures, and what would our lives look like without them? To be sure, The Hearing Trumpet issues nothing in the way of answers. The novel eludes any whiff of definitiveness, instead layering ideas and questions atop one another like blocks in a Jenga tower. Naturally, Carrington forces the reader to withdraw the first block ... The Hearing Trumpet is a tremendously weird novel that revels in inconclusive ideas, surreal reimaginings, and the peculiarities of human consciousness. While the deluge of mythology and allusion can occasionally inhibit an otherwise pleasurable reading experience, The Hearing Trumpet’s singular, provocative perspective provides a vivid glimpse into Leonora Carrington’s invaluably frenetic mind.
