Unable to narrate himself into the story of Mozambique on that day, Couto has been writing about the country ever since, as if to atone for that original sin. His life has been woven into the history of the nation, and he has become the foremost chronicler of Mozambique’s antiheroes: its women, its peasants, even its dead.
As his characters grapple with violence, isolation and modernity in far-flung corners of the country, the lines of reality can blur, often through magical and otherworldly explanations drawn from folklore, witchcraft and religion.
This growing investment in special interest publications shows how much the commercial strategy of the magazine industry has changed.
“It is completely the opposite of the business model of the 20th century for magazines,” Husni said. “We used to have the magazine almost for free, selling the customers to the advertisers, giving the content to the customers. Now we are in the business of selling the content to the customers.”
The test of banked knowledge and problem-solving ability can boost your ego, or deflate it. But either way, you’re clearing out the cobwebs, right? It’s the “use it or lose it” theory in action, and as I get older, I’d like to believe these mental exercises can help keep my mind sharp and maybe even ward off memory loss, even if my wife usually beats me at all these games.
But is there any science behind that, or is it wishful thinking?
I Have Some Questions for You seems at first glance like a retreat for Makkai, whose previous novel, The Great Believers, was a brilliant and ambitious chronicle of the AIDS epidemic. Following a group of gay men in Chicago in the 1980s and deftly interweaving plots from different time periods, Makkai captured the scourge’s devastating long-term repercussions in a city given far less attention than either Los Angeles or New York. Yet look again, and I Have Some Questions for You, too, tackles big social convulsions that raise questions about memory, and about how we assign blame. But this time, training a wary eye on our true-crime obsession and on #MeToo revelations, Makkai conveys less confidence that we have useful means of excavating and telling the stories that haunt us. The novel’s dizzying tour of tweets and headlines and podcast sound bites leaves us unmoored even as it has us hooked—and that’s precisely the point.
That old proverb your mother taught you — “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again” — applies to marine archaeology just as it does to other aspects of life. That’s the lesson of a new work of nonfiction from Mensun Bound, one of the world’s foremost shipwreck hunters, who failed in 2019 to find Sir Ernest Shackleton’s “Endurance” on the bottom of Antarctica’s Weddell Sea, but succeeded three years later.