This is soup, dangit — it’s practically medicinal in its healing properties, both physical and mental. You wouldn’t dollop caviar with a metal spoon or pour an IPA into a champagne flute, so why shouldn’t soup be granted the dignity of its own dedicated vessel?
The heightened expectations I was feeling changed the experience of shaping the nori, rice, and fillings. Where once it had been fun—mucking about—it became work. What I needed to do was to hear, think about, and implement the feedback while still thinking of the process as play. I needed to retain my sense of it as joy.
‘But isn’t it boring?” asked my partner. I had just explained the concept of Alphabetical Diaries, a book which delivers almost exactly what its title promises. The novelist Sheila Heti kept a journal for more than 10 years; she then culled sentences from the pages and arranged those sentences in alphabetical order. The book proceeds from A to Z: in the first chapter, each sentence starts with A, in the second each starts with B, and so on. The structure of the book is slick and oddly captivating. I read it over the holiday season, when lots of people were coming and going from the house, and everyone seemed to want to know more about it. Their curiosity turned quickly to scepticism – the historically correct response to the avant garde.
So, to answer the question: Yes. Absolutely. The book is boring. Sometimes. It’s also thrilling, very funny, often filthy, and a surprisingly powerful weapon against loneliness, at least for this reader. How it achieves all this has to do with the sentences themselves, but even more than that with the unlikelihood of their arrangement; it’s the sentences’ crackpot proximity to one another that makes them sing (admittedly a very odd song). From the W’s: “Why do I look for symbols? Why do women go mad? Why does one bra clasp on the front and the other in back?”
In Hypergraphia and Other Failed Attempts at Paradise, Jennifer Metsker gives us over to a mind that makes and unmakes the world. Metsker’s speaker revels in sensory experience even as she troubles the notion that one’s senses are a pathway to truth. While the speaker leads us through a vivid landscape of dead pets and disintegrating language, she bobs in and out of psychosis and interfaces with the banal strictures of care facilities. Through visions and perambulations, Metsker renders a world in which the borders of illness and wellness, reality and unreality, remain perpetually unstable.
A question arises from Ernaux’s body of work and from its attempt to exhaust inexhaustible memory. How does a writer “carry to completion” something lived if writing that thing down—as with the observer effect in quantum mechanics—changes and even adds to the original experience? As Ernaux said in her Nobel lecture: “I conceived of writing as nothing less than the possibility of transfiguring reality.” Imagine Sisyphus finding an additional boulder each time he returned to the bottom of the hill. The question is in sharp relief in The Young Man; it is like an echo laughing back from the epigraph.
Ultimately, Fitzgerald argues that instead of trying to fix the city we might do better to try to fix ourselves — and to question the “anti-urban” philosophy dominating public discussion. Throughout this eclectic book, Fitzgerald’s contrarian outlook is a touchstone.
He despises the Paris streetscape (for its “mix of imperial pomp and saccharine cutesiness”), but he loves Sheffield city centre, and he wryly suggests that we might need to completely reconsider the values we reflexively assign to the city and to nature.