Naming a book is a bit like naming a child. The title is the book’s given name, what it goes by. The author’s byline is the book’s surname, which it has in common with every other book by that writer. And the subtitle? It’s the book’s middle name. That is, it’s not what anyone calls the thing, but you’re stuck with it forever, so you might as well pick something good.
What if you could make a list of everything Mark Twain ever read and of every book he ever owned? Dr Alan Gribben, cofounder of the Mark Twain Circle of America, has spent the last 45 years doing just that. But why? For more recent authors such as Philip Roth or John Updike, the idea of chronicling their reading isn’t unusual: Roth willed his book collection to Newark Public Library in New Jersey; Updike’s went to Harvard University’s Houghton Library. But Roth and Updike were both a different sort of writer. They lived in our era, and on land. As a steamboat captain, Twain – real name Samuel Langhorne Clemens – lived on the river, his life and work in constant motion as he authored travelogues, time-travel novels and adventure stories about runaway slaves. Would he have wanted a list out there, nailing down the precise location of every book he had owned?
‘There is no design-free world,’ writes Iris Bohnet, a behavioural economist at Harvard, in her book What Works: Gender Equality by Design (2016). The material world in which individuals engage every day is shaped and reshaped through design – for better or worse. When entering a space, people have long been expected not only to compensate for but also to overcome their disabilities. But sometimes, no amount of ingenuity can overcome the mismatch between a given individual and a given space – and then, exclusion is the result.
As I read Blossoms in Autumn, a collaboration between the Belgian writer Zidrou and the Dutch artist Aimée de Jongh, I thought more than once that it was not quite to my taste. I found the dialogue a little cheesy; I hate the fact that the arc of its plot suggests a woman can consider her life a failure if she has not had children. In the end, though, these things didn’t really matter. Sometimes, a book pierces your heart like an arrow in spite of its faults and Blossoms in Autumn was, in my case, one of these.
What The Other Americans lacks in artistic consistency, it makes up for in narrative energy and political engagement. Speaking as a reader, that's more than enough to make me stay.
You are a car, you are
a hospital,
warm lights
at the edge