I am still moved by the quiet miracle of that boyhood afternoon. But my relationship with art has changed. I look for trouble now. No longer is a Vermeer painting simply “foreign and alluring.” It is an artifact inescapably involved in the world’s messiness — the world when the painting was made and the world now. Looking at paintings this way doesn’t spoil them. On the contrary, it opens them up, and what used to be mere surface becomes a portal, divulging all kinds of other things I need to know.
The relationship between physics and mathematics goes back to the beginning of both subjects; as the fields have advanced, this relationship has gotten more and more tangled, a complicated tapestry. There is seemingly no end to the places where a well-placed set of tools for making calculations could help physicists, or where a probing question from physics could inspire mathematicians to create entirely new mathematical objects or theories.
The joke that people love to hate — or hate to love — American cheese is outdated. We’re at the point where we can all admit it’s good. You ever top a burger with fresh mozzarella and watch as it sits there and does everything but melt? Ever try putting a slice of cheddar on ramen only to witness the puddles of fat sweat out from the clumpy solids? In these cases and so many others, it must be American cheese, our collective shorthand for a perfectly creamy melt.
By the end of the first, four-page-long sentence of “Mild Vertigo,” I found myself strongly identifying with Natsumi, the Tokyo housewife at the center of the Japanese author Mieko Kanai’s latest novel to be translated into English. Never mind that my life and Natsumi’s are nothing alike. Like her, I too began to fret about the cleanliness of my kitchen walls. My thoughts began to mimic the buzzy, galumphing rhythms of Natsumi’s interior world. I began to wonder whether I had always thought this way, whether this book was making me aware of the true nature of my mind for the first time. Such is the mesmerizing wonder of Kanai’s prose, as translated by Polly Barton.
In its themes of misinformation, potential microbiological Trojan horses and conspiracy, Conquest can also be read in total as a joyously fantastical and elaborate Covid-19 allegory; if so, it is surely the best book yet to emerge from the pandemic.
The Choice is a satisfyingly solid novel. It is splendidly old-fashioned. Its theme is clear. There is a good story. The characters are all well-rounded and credible. It is concerned with morality and questions of morality, and this is pleasing partly because it is rare today to read something which is concerned with the fundamental question of right and wrong rather than merely with today’s fashionable prejudices. Arditti is also that unusual thing, a serious Christian novelist, an English counterpart of the American Marillyn Robinson, and in the same class as her.