Yet that’s the problem in a nutshell. When I read, I don’t want less but rather more. I want to immerse, whether in a piece of reporting about Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell or a novel or a book of poems. I want to engage with the world by, paradoxically, removing myself from it, for however long it takes.
I don’t read, in other words, as a client, or even a consumer, but rather as a partner. As every dedicated reader understands, ours is an active art. “The unread story,” Ursula K. Le Guin once observed, “is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp.”
Only a reader, she is saying, can make a piece of writing come to life.
Dizz Tate’s debut novel, Brutes, opens with a disappearance: Sammy Liu-Lou, daughter of a famous televangelist and an enigmatic rebel with shaved hair. When her mother discovers her empty bed, one question echoes around this fictitious Florida town, “tickling” the surface of the lake that lies ominously undisturbed at its centre: “Where is she?”
Somewhat infuriatingly, Sammy is to remain a mystery, since this novel is not about her, but the gang of eighth-grade girls hunched behind binoculars at their bedroom windows, ogling her – and all other residents’ – every move. These are Tate’s “brutes”, who together make up the book’s sardonic yet vulnerably naive first-person plural narrator. Sammy’s vanishing is just one diversion in what reads like a literary house of mirrors, deliberately only scratching the surface of the dubious (and occasionally supernatural) carryings-on in this swampy, theme park-adjacent landscape.
In the 1990s, something odd happened in Beijing’s burgeoning fine dining scene. Among the chic eateries, restaurants emerged with very simple dishes: meat and vegetables cooked in plain style with few frills. The diners were not there just for the cuisine, but to relive the experience of a period generally considered a disaster: the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76. The plain dishes were meant to invoke a time of restrained, austere living, when people thought of the collective rather than the individual. Only the sky-high prices reminded diners that they were living in a time of Chinese capitalism.
This recasting of the Cultural Revolution as a period deserving of nostalgia began in the 1990s, but it is still in full swing, and it shapes a struggle for ownership of history in today’s China. In Red Memory, Tania Branigan tells a dark, gripping tale of battles between Chinese whose views of the period – violent nightmare or socialist utopia? – still divide family and friends. Branigan was the Guardian’s China correspondent between 2008 and 2015, and during those years interviewed people whose lives were formed, for good or ill, by the Cultural Revolution. This book is not primarily about what happened, but the way that memories of that time shape, and distort, the very different China of today.
Lucy, when I die,
I want you to scatter one-third of my ashes among the sand dunes
of Virginia Beach.