Why read biographies at all? There’s the draw of a distinctive character followed over the course of time, tested as characters are in novels. But when it comes to biography, the point is that it’s not fiction. What happened is documented; the back matter, whether the reader consults it or not, must be there. The challenge is to find a telling narrative lurking in every life amidst all its visible activity: making appointments, business communications and getting on from tea to dinner. Let’s look to the frontier of the genre, to those who abjure inclusiveness in favor of a living narrative and cut their way to the kernel.
A schism is emerging in the scientific enterprise. On the one side is the human mind, the source of every story, theory and explanation that our species holds dear. On the other stand the machines, whose algorithms possess astonishing predictive power but whose inner workings remain radically opaque to human observers. As we humans strive to understand the fundamental nature of the world, our machines churn out measurable, practical predictions that seem to extend beyond the limits of thought. While understanding might satisfy our curiosity, with its narratives about cause and effect, prediction satisfies our desires, mapping these mechanisms on to reality. We now face a choice about which kind of knowledge matters more – as well as the question of whether one stands in the way of scientific progress.
Today the word “refugee” is practically synonymous with those who have fled the Syrian war and its trail of destitution. But in a different time, in the aftermath of a different war — the one in Vietnam — the term evoked the more than three million people who fled Southeast Asia for a chance at a better life.
Souvankham Thammavongsa, a writer who has published four books of poetry, was born in a refugee camp, to Laotian parents, and raised in Toronto. In “How to Pronounce Knife,” her impressive debut story collection, her family’s arduous, yearslong journey west forms the unspoken back story of the immigrant Laotians who congregate in its pages. Like her own parents, Thammavongsa’s protagonists have lost their place in the world; now, in various unnamed North American cities, they are forced to invent their lives anew.
That Christmas I ran through fire in London
carrying my old father across my shoulders.
My mother too, she followed. You alive alas,
I could not bring.
As long as I struggle to float above the ground
and fail, there is reason for this poetry.
I find that I have started recently
to keep spare keys to the front door
in several pockets, such is my fear