I didn’t realize it at first. I began to learn what happened when, out of the depths of nowhere, a voice asked if I knew where I was. I struggled to produce my monosyllabic answer: “No.”
The voice responded: “You’re in the ICU. You had a heart attack during your hockey game last night. A player on the other team saved your life.”
I didn’t remember going to a game last night. The last thing I remembered … I couldn’t remember the last thing I remembered. I didn’t even know what a heart attack felt like.
“Getting Lost” is both weapon and record. It is artillery in Ernaux’s battle against forgetfulness and even against ennui. There have been other men, other passions. With S, she accepts a bounded love and rejoices within the perimeters she accepts. She even thinks about weeping with anticipation: “Maybe I will tonight.” Tears have an orchestrated quality, as if part of the symphony of love. His indifference and her obsession are the twin tracks of the book’s story.
Kevin Powers’s third novel, “A Line in the Sand,” is set primarily in the Tidewater region of Virginia, but its heart is located 6,000 miles away, in war-torn Iraq. Nearly every character is a veteran of the conflict that decimated that nation in the years following the United States’ 2003 invasion. They may have physically left the combat zones of Mosul and Fallujah, but that doesn’t mean their war is over.
With a title like The Girls of Summer, you might find yourself picking up Katie Bishop’s debut novel with expectations of a typical sun-drenched summer read. But whilst this book partly takes place on a secluded, sun-trapped Greek island, where the days are lazy, the nights long, the drinks flow endlessly, and the rest of the world feels a million miles away, there’s a darker side to the story that casts a sharp spotlight on the complicated nature of power, consent and recollection.
A book about proceeding in brokenness, On The Inconvenience of Other People is simultaneously an experiment, if not a map, on how to do theory in a damaged world. Throughout it, Berlant writes in what they term ‘a parenthetical voice’. Like the modes of the episodic and the elliptical, this voice proceeds uncertainly, while ‘limiting the sneaky ways em dashes, notes, and other modes of insertion’ to avoid a hierarchical organisation of thought and of reading. Preferring spontaneity and the immediacy of the visceral, the voice gives rise to a collection of ‘assays’ that are open-ended, inviting re-writing, continuation and improvement. Destined to be Berlant’s last book, On The Inconvenience of Other People is not their final contribution then. They have left us how the book begins – in the middle of life, asking that we pick it up and change what the object is and can do.
The column is a miscellany: three or four items, irreverent and journalistic in tone. It’s a small treat for readers who make it to the end.
From 1997 to 2020, its golden age, the column was signed J.C. This correspondent has officially been outed as James Campbell, a biographer of James Baldwin and a longtime editor at the magazine. He was a good steward of the column, and his best material has been collected now in “NB by J.C.: A Walk Through the Times Literary Supplement.”
Science is under attack. Ironically, the weapons are products of science itself: the propagation of misleading information, the torturing of data to ‘prove’ claims about anything, the mining of data untroubled by any hypothesis about what you might find. As Gary Smith writes in Distrust, “Disinformation is spread by the Internet that scientists created. Data torturing is driven by scientists’ insistence on empirical evidence. Data mining is fuelled by the big data and powerful computers that scientists created.”