Imaginary numbers are not imaginary at all. The truth is, they have had far more impact on our lives than anything truly imaginary ever could. Without imaginary numbers, and the vital role they played in putting electricity into homes, factories, and internet server-farms, the modern world would not exist. Students who might complain to their math teacher that there’s no point in anyone learning how to use imaginary numbers would have to put down their phone, turn off their music, and pull the wires out of their broadband router. But perhaps we should start with an explanation of what an imaginary number is.
The Grass Hotel leaves us with a persuasive articulation of familial power dynamics, their emotional turbulence, and the psychical cling – like ash in water – of our parents. “We slip into our children’s minds and they don’t know if it’s actual or figment,” says the novel’s mother to her son, the author to himself. “Carried in them onward and they slip into their children the same.”
Schulz finds a series of deeply touching ways to honor and celebrate both the conjunction and continuity that her entwined experiences of losing and finding love have shown her. Life, she realizes, is clearest in the forward-moving union that “and” promises: that moment when we’re alive with both grief and joy, both the knowledge that we are nothing and the awareness that the world is waiting for us. This gorgeous memoir is heartbreaking and restorative all at once.
It is an ambitious mission to rail against the plethora of standards expected of women over the centuries while also focusing on understanding the contemporary Australian experience. Kaz Cooke delivers an expansive inventory of guilt-invoking, shaming, and frequently dangerous instructions directed at women, setting a largely unattainable and objectionable (also objectifying) bar. It could be a morose tale of edicts, often seeded in patriarchal dominance, that have weighed upon women’s lives. Instead, it is a witty and fun read despite the often-harmful repercussions of bad advice.