Maybe Gutkind wasn’t naming a new kind of writing, though. Maybe he was giving a new name to an old kind of writing. Maybe he wanted people to understand that writing traditionally classified as nonfiction is, or can be, as “creative” as poems and stories. By “creative,” then, he didn’t mean “made up” or “imaginary.” He meant something like “fully human.” Where did that come from?
One answer is suggested by Samuel W. Franklin’s provocative new book, “The Cult of Creativity”. Franklin thinks that “creativity” is a concept invented in Cold War America—that is, in the twenty or so years after 1945. Before that, he says, the term barely existed. “Create” and “creation,” of course, are old words (not to mention, as Franklin, oddly, does not, “Creator” and “Creation”). But “creativity,” as the name for a personal attribute or a mental faculty, is a recent phenomenon.
Yet to Mother Nature, the evolution of the eye isn't really a difficult feat at all, it turns out. Indeed, there are about 10 different types of eye design in the animal kingdom, and eyes have evolved independently across animal species approximately 50 times or more. Furthermore, genetic evidence reveals that eyes can evolve relatively quickly — in as short as just a few hundred thousand years. That may sound like a long time, but on geological timescales, it's a blink of an … well, you know.
Limón’s “The Hurting Kind” asks us to consider the minutest of experiences through observing and connecting with the natural world and everything within it, whether an insect in a garden, the swelling of oceans or the branches of trees. We observe a constantly moving world in which humanity co-exists and, too, partakes in the cyclical experiences of life - the joys and sorrows, the good and the bad, and love and grief. While we must also consider ourselves, including our empathy and compassion we place on friends, family and strangers.
Blue Hour tackles a number of weighty themes, including grief, police brutality, sex versus love, and the ways we choose to cope with events we aren’t yet able to process. But what is central to the novel, acting as connective tissue amongst the other themes mentioned, is parenthood.
Kang’s latest isn’t a page-turner, and reading it can feel like being suspended in time, or sitting through a very long class, despite the book’s slimness. But that’s the effect of writing into discomfort. It’s important for the reader to feel it in their own body, a reminder that language is connected to the corporeal. Halfway through the book, she writes that the loss of words makes the world “fragmented, each piece distinct and separate — like the colored paper inside the kaleidoscope, shifting silently, repeatedly and in concert to form new patterns.” A distorted or disrupted perspective is the only path to clarity for her characters. In “Greek Lessons” Kang reaches beyond the usual senses to translate the unspeakable.
Taken at its most obvious face value, “Greek Lessons” can be read as an allegory about two sensory-handicapped people who endure years of isolation and psychological trauma only to find understanding, acceptance and human connection in the unlikeliest of places.
But contrary to Kang’s insistence in the interview, the novel’s true power lies not in its plot, but in its prose. As she did in “The Vegetarian” and most notably “The White Book,” Kang riddles the text with evocative descriptions that simultaneously illuminate and reflect.
The Washington Post humor columnist takes us on a tour of centuries of US history, including a first-hand look at the Adamses struggling to confirm how many petticoats and long shirts have been removed at any point in a year-and-a-half-long correspondence, interrupted by concerns over the health of their cows and a particularly lascivious note from Benjamin Franklin.