In his introduction, he openly acknowledged this, writing ‘Secondhand booksellers are the most friendly and most eccentric of all the characters I have known. If I had not been a writer, theirs would have been the profession I would most happily have chosen.’
If Greene was alive today, he would look at his beloved second-hand and antiquarian bookshops with an air of sorrow, leavened with a touch of bewilderment.
The neuroscientist David Eagleman has said, “You’re always living in the past”—meaning not that the past haunts us, though it does, but that what we experience as the present is in fact the past, the very recent past, the just past. In a way, then, time is memory—not clock-time, perhaps. Not Einstein’s time. But human time is human memory.
In his poem ‘God’s Grandeur’ (1877), Gerard Manley Hopkins laments modern man’s estrangement from the divine with the lines: ‘The soil/Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.’ The beach is one of the few places where the modern human foot can comfortably achieve a state of elemental earthly contact.
But then the snack bar on the other side of the parking lot beckons. My feet, blissfully shoeless, arrive at the curb to meet a jagged expanse of sun-baked asphalt, gravelly pebbles and the remnants of smashed beer bottles, and my idyll comes to an abrupt end in a heartfelt appreciation of the purpose and power of the humble shoe.
This novel reminds readers of why we go to books in search of answers to life’s great questions, among them how to demand more of our lovers and ourselves, how to guide the children in our lives and how to grieve our losses and our mistakes. We could all stand to follow Betty’s advice to Mr. Chetan to follow a romantic lead: “Do it while your teeth in your mouth and not in a glass by the sink.”
“If nobody sees you, are you still there?” Vivek Oji asks from beyond the grave in Akwaeke Emezi’s powerful new novel, “The Death of Vivek Oji.” It’s a question that ripples outward into the rest of the book, drawing readers and characters into a search for Vivek’s true self. Though the book opens with the ominous news of his death and is framed as a kind of mystery around it, the truth we spiral toward has far more to do with Vivek’s life, its secrets and its moments of unfettered joy.
When we refer to someone as having a “bunker mentality” we usually mean they are so stuck in their ways that they’re unable to look around and see the world for what it is. But is it possible that the rational response to the state of the world is to retreat into a bomb-proof, virus-free bunker?
In his new book Bunker: Building for the End Times, Bradley Garrett, an American “experimental geographer” and “urban explorer”, sets out if not to answer this question, then at least to raise it. Never before in recorded history, he writes, “has humankind faced such grave, and myriad, existential threats” as we do today.
Increasingly, the threats and fissures that mark our reality are known, but this doesn’t make them any easier to comprehend. It’s only when a potential disaster turns actual that it becomes real to us — and in that moment it will still feel incomprehensible, impossible, unforeseen.
More confounding than any maze,
With dead ends at every turn,