When the inaugural issue of the prestigious literary magazine Criterion hit shelves in October 1922, it included a 434-line-long poem by a little-known American author who spent his days as a banker at Lloyd’s. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, with its cacophony and bleakness, encapsulated in verse the spirit of modernism, much like Stravinsky had in music with Rite of Spring in 1913.
The Waste Land includes drowned sailors, soothsayers and tarot-card readers, and quarreling lovers. There are mythological figures, such as Tiresias, Tristan, and Isolde, and lines from poems, operas, and works of literature that span genres and cultures. Undergirding the action is one of the most well-known, yet enigmatic myths in Western tradition, namely the legend of the Fisher King, which contains elements of your standard heroic quest, the restoration of the land, and cyclical fertility rites.
“Merry christmas from the Family”, a country song by Robert Earl Keen released in 1994, tells the tale of a sprawling festive get-together, replete with champagne punch, carol-singing and turkey. Many listeners will recognise the chaos the narrator describes; even more than that, they may identify with his struggle to recall how he is related to the various guests. “Fred and Rita drove from Harlingen,” Mr Keen croons. “Can’t remember how I’m kin to them.”
That may have something to do with the English language. It is often joked that anyone around your age is a “cousin”, regardless of actual relation, and anyone older is an “uncle” or “aunt”. English is rather bare in its terms for family members. Other languages pay far more attention to the details.
Sleepwalk is a literary picaresque full of dark wit and quirky observations set in an alternate America. Mixed in with the purely imagined are characters, technologies, and events that are real, and taken together, demonstrate just how close we are to things getting really weird.
“It doesn’t matter how lucky you are”, says the protagonist of Leila Mottley’s debut novel, “because you still gotta work day in and day out trying to stay alive while someone else falls through the cracks.” “Nightcrawling” tells the compelling story of a young black woman who, despite her best efforts, finds herself “stuck between street and gutter”. Set in the author’s native Oakland, California, and inspired by a true crime which made headlines in 2015, the book is both a searing depiction of sexual exploitation and a gripping account of a struggle for survival.
When asked how to write in a world dominated by a white culture, Toni Morrison once responded: “By trying to alter language, simply to free it up, not to repress or confine it … Tease it. Blast its racist straitjacket.” At a time when structural imbalances of capital, health, gender and race deepen divides, the young American Leila Mottley’s debut novel is a searing testament to the liberated spirit and explosive ingenuity of such storytelling.
Although Pavone fans may find “Two Nights in Lisbon” quite a stretch, this smart, calculating author remains many notches above others in his field. He is worldly and inviting when it comes to the book’s mostly European settings. His book captures a vacation’s escapism even as its heroine feels walls closing in. And his smaller scenes, like those set in Ariel’s bookstore, feel much less forced than his high-stakes ones. It’s a nice touch to say that the bookstore, with its coffee and greeting cards, does “a brisk business in banal.” Ariel can be accused of many things, but banality isn’t one.
A closed current
as small as a necklace
this water. Looking down at the pebble beach