PositivePloughsharesA Handbook of Disappointed Fate is an intense collection of essays—fables and manifestos collected from over a decade of Anne Boyer’s work—serving as both a scathing critique of and a brilliant testament to daily existence under the physical realities of oppressive structures. Her writing is relentlessly focused on the material and philosophical problems of writing and living in the contemporary world: A Handbook encompasses systemic oppression, the ethical imperatives of writing about it, the effects it has on the insistently material human body—all things circling the drain of Boyer’s personal experience ... This sounds lofty, but A Handbook is actually emphatically grounded in the realities of modern life, and seasoned with a generous dose of wit ... She uses what often feels like a tone of clinical remove and detachment to better analyze that which affects her directly, and no word is wasted: the sense is that she cannot afford inexact sentiments, practicing an economy of affect. Her writing curiously occupies the space between personal and impersonal ... Rather than attempt to succeed or exceed the inadequacies of language, Boyer’s writing operates within them, inside the space opened between the material and its linguistic depiction. The material exists in a territory outside of language; thus, Boyer brings her language to the territory of the material.
Nona Caspers
PositiveFull StopCaspers’s prose unifies form and content in a spectacular way as she writes the facts of grief, doing justice to both its devastation and transcendence, the sublime surreality it bestows on the world through the mere fact that one must continue to live in it. It is the quotidian and surreal aspects of grief and memory that accumulate to form the backbone of this novel ... Caspers’s tone is not quite that of an earnestly delivered elegy. Her prose behaves like memory itself in that it careens from association to association. In the hyperreal writing of isolated parts and objects, she sloughs off the heavy materiality of the things being described for the grace of that which they evoke. We see, repeatedly, how the narrator’s grief ruptures her reality, as she crafts multiple outcomes for various objects and events in her daily life ... In the wake of her partner’s death, the narrator continues to live each day, and in the altered state of grief, the mundane aspects of daily life are made magical by merely noticing.
Veronica Gerber Bicecci, Trans. by Christina MacSweeney
PositiveFull StopThe novel moves in a circular fashion, revolving around certain fixations, themes, concepts: dendrochronology, the study of tree rings; astronomy and telescopes; geometric shapes. But these strange, seemingly unconnected other obsessions are unified by the ways in which the narrator takes and warps them into variously extra-linguistic methods of meaning-making. Always there is an emphasis on language and what it can and cannot accomplish ... The narrator’s ruminating is melancholic, as she must continually return to language to express her thoughts, despite the fact that it seems to repeatedly show itself as inadequate ... Pushing her illustrations to describe difficult things calls to mind how much else they actually evoke: whorls, voids, eclipses. Every word on the page is a Venn diagram: the meaning might be found in the space between what is and isn’t written.
Anna Kavan
RaveThe RumpusIce was Kavan’s first major literary success and it is difficult to classify: it is post-apocalyptic science fiction with the caveat of ‘kind of.’ The subgenre that it shares most characteristics with is slipstream, in that it obsessively constructs an atmosphere of not-quite-realism. We are immediately made aware of a potentially delusional narrator … Essentially the book revolves around a love triangle, emphatically minus the love: the narrator pursues the girl against her husband, known only as ‘the warden’; the warden possesses the girl with an uncomfortable severity. Encircling them are the inexplicable, inhospitable glaciers. Attempts at actually characterizing the ‘glass girl’ always fall upon emphasizing her presumed victimhood … Certainly this is a book full of violence, but Kavan’s masterful and exacting prose never lets us forget that violence has to do with the human—specifically with the man—starting with the violence of language itself.
