Today, groundwater in Michoacán is disappearing, and its bodies of water are drying up. Lake Zirahuén is polluted by agricultural runoff. Nearly 85 percent of the country was experiencing a drought in 2021, and experts project that the state’s Lake Cuitzeo, the second largest in all of Mexico, could disappear within a decade. In part because of the conversion from pine to avocado trees, the rainy season has shrunk from around six months to three. So profound is the drain on the region’s aquifers that small earthquakes have newly become commonplace. The one-hundred-mile avocado corridor has, in effect, become the only live theater of what is often referred to as “California’s water wars.”
It’s unclear whether the avocado can survive this changing climate. But in Michoacán, the more pressing question is whether its residents can survive the avocado.
The ebb and flow of water was essential to medieval understandings of time. As Chaucer put it in ‘The Man of Law’s Tale’, ‘time wol nat abide/Fro day to night it changeth as the tide.’ When he wrote those words, a mechanical clock was being built at the abbey in St Albans: it showed the time, the position of the stars and the state of the tides at London Bridge. Time was movement and flux, and the sea revealed its regular rhythm; if the tides ceased, time was out of joint. ‘What is time?’ St Augustine wondered. ‘Provided that no one asks me, I know.’ Gillian Adler and Paul Strohm explore the many answers proposed by writers, artists and visionaries in the Middle Ages. ‘Medieval people’, they write, were ‘more keenly aware of simultaneous and contending temporalities than we are, and more skilled at entertaining a wider range of temporal possibilities’. Fifteen centuries of waiting for the end made time an existential problem: how to describe it, how to measure it, how to use it? The Cloud of Unknowing, a 14th-century devotional treatise, put the matter starkly: ‘All time is goven to thee, and it schal be askid of thee how thou hast dispended it.’
Almost four years before Galileo’s launch, in January 1986, the space shuttle Challenger had exploded shortly after lift-off, taking seven lives with it. NASA cancelled its plans to dispatch Galileo on a speedy path to Jupiter using a liquid-fuelled rocket aboard another space shuttle. Instead, the probe was released more gently from an orbiting shuttle, with mission engineers slingshotting it around Venus and Earth so it could gain the gravitational boosts that would catapult it all the way to Jupiter.
On 8 December 1990, Galileo was due to skim past Earth, just 960 kilometres above the surface. The tickling became an itch that Sagan had to scratch. He talked NASA into pointing the spacecraft’s instruments at our planet. The resulting paper was titled ‘A search for life on Earth from the Galileo spacecraft’.
I think one reason I love the notion of a single-ingredient focus — which I've tried to do in some of my own food writing — is that it accentuates the point that there is much to investigate and enjoy about one ingredient. You may love cauliflower, but if you only cook it one way and rarely ever veer away form that variation, then are you really enjoying cauliflower to the fullest?
There's much to untangle and savor in this exquisite novel, including the symbolism of the titular doors and the significance of Reynaldo Hahn's musical composition based on Paul Verlaine's poem "L'heure exquise" ("The Exquisite Hour").
But for me, especially upon re-reading Maugham's The Casuarina Tree, I was struck by Tan's audaciousness in manipulating Maugham's stories in the interests of literature in much the same way that Maugham himself had fed his fiction by manipulating the stories people told him during his travels.
Here, Newman turns Orwell’s classic vision of the future inside out, and readers will find themselves gripped and surprised by what happens when the object of Winston Smith’s gaze looks back, and retells their journey into love and resistance. I began the book a little sceptical about whether a reimagining of Nineteen Eighty-Four would work as a novel in its own right. Fan fiction can rarely stand on its own, particularly when the source material is as precise and complete as Orwell’s. But Newman delivers on more than one level.