Writers not only don’t work alone: they can’t. The key proxy for a vibrant book culture is the little packs they form when things are going well. A literary work of art begins long before the fateful confrontation with the blank page, in the whole life we’ve lived to know what to put upon it. And only a life full of friends among the living and the dead is conducive to the production of real art. Of course a writer is always their irreducibly individual voice—but how do you think they first learned to sing with it? In honing it against the voices of others just as invested in questions of beauty, in histories of forms; in digging up the neglected works that always ought to have been classics, and treating them as such amongst ourselves; in ruthless mutual critique, becoming accountable to one another as editors and collaborators; in mockery and contempt for what’s bad, and throwing the occasional wrench into the machinery of the establishment.
Whoever writes about the living must be careful, because they can defend themselves, if necessary with the help of the courts. Whereas for the dead the opposite is true. When you write about them, you must be careful because they are at your mercy. The only thing protecting them is your sense of what is appropriate.
Could this global recognition of African literature be a compensatory gesture for all the historical sufferings inflicted on the continent by the (Euro-American) countries from where these awards are administered? Does it even matter that most of the winners of these awards are Africans living abroad?
It is this last question about the diasporic circumstances of African writers and writings that interests me. Whether one is referring to the lived transnationality of African writers or the diasporic nature of their writings, there seems to be a debate among critics about the prospects of reading contemporary African literature as diasporic literature.
Some say that history begins with writing; we say that history begins with clothing. In the beginning, there was clothing made from skins that early humans removed from animals, processed, and then tailored to fit the human body; this technique is still used in the Arctic. Next came textiles. The first weavers would weave textiles in the shape of animal hides or raise the nap of the fabric’s surface to mimic the appearance of fur, making the fabric warmer and more comfortable.
In our gastronomically obsessed age, these are pleasurable not because of the recipes — though many contain a few perfunctory ones — but for their often humorous explication of how to be a good host, or as was far more common back in the day, hostess. They are replete with chafing dishes and towering candelabras, billowing chiffon sleeves and conversational pointers. And culinary shortcuts, a la Eleanor Roosevelt serving hot dogs to the king and queen of England: The Joy of Not Cooking.
Listening to books was not the same as reading them. But whereas before, I had taken the value of written and audio books as mutually exclusive, I began to entertain the idea that maybe an audiobook was its own thing. I began to recognize the disparagement of audiobooks—whether open or implicit—as a certain kind of ableism. The written word is seen as a default, and any translation of it, as with my dyslexic students, was a mark of inferiority.
The point is everything else: the almost unimaginable unworldliness of the situation. Six imprisoned professionals are speeding around the world at seventeen and a half thousand miles an hour. They circle the Earth sixteen times a day, and thus daily witness sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets (“the whip-crack of morning arrives every ninety minutes”). A gigantic typhoon can be seen gathering over the western Pacific and moving toward the Philippines and Indonesia; this event, from the godlike vantage of the I.S.S., is important but also irrelevant, no more than a vicious corkscrew of distant cloud cover on that faraway blue marble. The real point of “Orbital” is the demonstration of how a writer might capture this spectacular strangeness in language adequate to the spectacle. And how she might do so with fitting surplus, in ways that surpass the more orderly permissions of journalism and nonfictional prose.
At the end of this consummate biography, Wullschläger describes Monet in despair, fearing he will die “without having achieved anything I like… because I am seeking the impossible”. By then, however, many of his contemporaries had long recognised the enormity of his achievement. He was responsible for a new conception of landscape; not just recording a place but also painting time, not just depicting his own sensations but disinterring the memories of the viewer. When Proust wrote, “There has to be someone who will say to us, here is what you may love; love it,” Monet was that man.
While Tim Marshall’s previous works have firmly established him as a prominent authority on the politics of geography, in this new book he enters uncharted territory: an appraisal of the geopolitical dynamics and consequences of space exploration. In a series of earlier books Marshall considered the impact of geography on the possibilities and limitations of the projection of national power in some of the world’s political hotspots. The Future of Geography breaks new ground by probing how major world powers’ activities in space may come to shape the future of world politics in (until recently) ways which could not have been envisaged.