In November 2021, linguists from around the world met in Lausanne, Switzerland, for the seventh edition of a conference focusing specifically on the “R” sound. The conference, called ‘R-Atics, included a presentation on the intrusive R used in the Falkland Islands, a reconstruction of what R sounded like in historical Armenian, and a discussion of the R sounds in Shiwiar, an indigenous Ecuadorian language spoken by well under 10,000 people, among other events and talks. Don’t be too surprised if, at a future ‘R-Atics conference, the “crispy R” joins the ranks of esoteric presentations from linguists obsessed with the weirdness and variation of this particular sound.
Of course, you can get up and pee during Killers of the Flower Moon, the same way you can nip out for popcorn or to check your email or just stay in your seat and let your mind wander. A movie can solicit your attention, but it can’t compel it. It’s true that Killers isn’t much longer than the average football game or an evening’s worth of Grey’s Anatomy episodes, but it requires a different level of, to use Scorsese’s word, commitment.
Kate Briggs’s début novel, “The Long Form,” is a portrait of that nearness, of “a community of at least two.” The plot is deceptively bare: Helen and her baby, Rose, live through a day together. They have, so far, lived through almost six weeks’ worth of days, spent in constant, profuse closeness. But the plaster understanding of what a “day” is has flaked off, and, with it, the glue of social agreement, revealing the gleam of raw hours previously concealed. This is, in part, because of sleep deprivation—at one point, Helen weeps at the sight of a river flowing, her tiredness deciding for her—and also because that’s what the presence of a very young baby does. It forces you to lift and look under minutes like they were big rocks, unwieldy chunks of continuity, with wet immensities of squiggling life trapped underneath. It’s also what novels can do, when done well.
E. J. Koh’s debut novel, “The Liberators,” opens with joy followed immediately by grief. Yohan, a man living in Daejeon, South Korea, in 1980, recalls the importance of writing in his childhood. He would use anything at hand to trace the shapes of letters and characters, spelling out words for the sheer pleasure of it. “At some point,” he narrates on the book’s opening page, “my mother set me down and didn’t pick me up again. On my mother’s grave, I wrote grave.”
This kind of transition — from the idea that every growing child will eventually stop being picked up by a parent to the understanding that tragedy has struck — is typical of the novel, which manages to convey sweeping changes and painful events in families and nations through condensed, often lyrical language. In just over 200 pages, “The Liberators” covers more than 30 years of a family’s life, not counting flashbacks, and explores how the past travels with us, and how we may find solace amid loss through relationships with others.
Professor Edward J Cowan, generally known as Ted, was one of Scotland’s most distinguished, learned and popular historians. He died in 2022 and it is a shame that he did not live to see the publication of this last and enthralling book, sub-titled The Arctic Scots. It is a splendid piece of compelling narrative history, at its heart the search for the North-West Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It is however much more than a history of voyages, being a study of the development of the Canadian North and the relationships between Scottish scientific historians and the native peoples, the Inuit and First Nations.