It was a setup: a stratagem worthy of wily Ulysses himself.
The conspirators were Bennett Cerf, publisher and cofounder of Random House, and Morris Ernst, a cofounder of the ACLU and its chief legal counsel. The target was United States anti-obscenity law. The bait was a single copy of an English-language novel, printed in Dijon by Frenchmen who could not understand a word of it, bound in bright blue boards, and sold mail-order by the celebrated Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Company. When Cerf and Ernst first began to conspire in 1931, the novel, James Joyce’s Ulysses, was the most notorious book in the world.
TIFF, I see now, concentrates one of my techniques for surviving depression. Oscillating between exhausted stasis and sobbing convulsions drove me to quit jobs, ignore friends, and hide from family as I shuttered myself in my apartment. This sickness also made reading and writing impossible, impairing my focus, memory, energy, and imagination to the point where I could not consume or compose a single sentence. The one thing I could handle—and that helped—were movies.
Perhaps no other writer has managed her own phenomenon with so much grace and skill. The Testaments is Atwood at her best, in its mixture of generosity, insight and control. The prose is adroit, direct, beautifully turned. All over the reading world, the history books are being opened to the next blank page and Atwood’s name is written at the top of it. To read this book is to feel the world turning, as the unforeseeable shifts of the last few years reveal the same old themes. It is also a chance to see your own political life flash in front of your eyes, to remember how the world was 30 years ago and say: “If she was right in 1985, she is more right today.”
The Last of Her Kind is a novel of dramatic episodes; its hinge event, which defines both Ann’s and George’s lives, occurs far enough into the book for me not to reveal it here. Suffice it to say that developments drive them apart, and much of the book is concerned with how and whether they will be able to work their way back to each other. Along the way, Nunez takes a jeweller’s eyepiece to racial and sexual politics, to the lasting impact of male violence and to the painful fragility of family bonds.
Tinfoil Butterfly is eerie, atmospheric, and almost unbearably dreary. Every time you think it can't get worse, Moulton delivers another hit, another bleak revelation, another unnerving vision. She fully engages with the weirdness of the place and never shies away from gore. However, the most important thing about this horrific read is that it doesn't need monsters to scare you — just cancer, heartbreak, abuse, and cocaine, all of which are normal things in our world. Now do yourself a favor and let Moulton's darkness invade your blood.
Where the book really shines — not surprisingly — is in the details about the science of the brain: what we know and what we do not. Rippon’s explanation of how we’ve studied the brain in the past, and how recent technological advances are giving us increasingly precise tools to do so, is endlessly interesting. But in the end, the discussion of how all of this relates to gender plays a bit of a second fiddle. Of course, if Rippon’s ultimate claim is simply that men’s and women’s brains are not so different after all, then perhaps that is as it should be.
The many-
oared asters
are coracles;