We’re not talking of different editions here, but of different texts, different words. In fact, people say and think having read Kafka or Dostoevsky, but what they have actually read are the words of Willa and Edwin Muir, Susan Bernofsky, Christopher Moncrieff, or again those of Constance Garnett, David McDuff or Michael Katz, to name just a few of the English translators of these two masterpieces of world literature.
The Montana hillside on which Switalski and I now stood was a prime example of an unglamorous yet powerful tool for protecting our biodiversity—road removal, commonly known as road decommissioning. In the early 2000s, the Forest Service brought heavy machinery to this old logging road, ripping it up to permit new grasses, shrubs and trees to sprout from the stirred earth. Waist-high thimbleberry bushes now covered the slope, and Douglas fir seedlings plunged roots deep into the loosened soil. It seemed improbable that 30-ton logging trucks had ever trundled through here along a ribbon of asphalt-hard dirt. “One time, I was skiing with a buddy of mine around here and we passed an old road,” Switalski said as we wandered through the clearing. “He didn’t believe there had ever been one there. That’s the ultimate sign of success.”
This dystopian drama is a shout of millennial protest and a bleak workplace satire. Desperate to impress at the Archive, Abernathy speaks in vacuous bullet points and cloaks his feelings beneath a mask of positivity. His supervisors sniff dismissively at his case notes, but he wrangles a promotion, and begins a sweetly low-key romance with his neighbour Rhoda. Yet work is poisoning him: he develops a cut that will not heal and snaps at his new assistant. Doubts swarm in his mind. Does he understand the first thing about the dreams he witnesses? When he siphons away their trauma, do the dreamers lose something of themselves? And where, exactly, do those nightmares go?
I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both is a rare thing: a genuinely successful rock novel, which many authors have attempted before, to decidedly mixed results. Stovall doesn't fill the book with name-dropping or long discourses on music; she conveys the essence of punk and emo through the prose itself.
Once he’d left Walden behind, in the following 15 years of his short life, Thoreau changed his writing and living style almost entirely: Instead of having an experience and then writing about it, he wrote while he lived, on the road with his pencils and in his attic at night. Thoreau turned the experience of being himself into something that happened in the present. If we take away anything about what it means to go to Walden, it should be this: By the time Thoreau finally wrote about his life at the pond, years after he had experienced it, he’d realized that one gains virtue not by leaving society—society and nature and the individual are far too enmeshed for that—but by standing inside the moment, and opening your arms to more.
McMahon has set himself an almost impossible task: to analyse humanity’s most powerful and contested idea throughout history and across the globe. Most attempts at total histories of ideas fail. Depth is sacrificed to achieve breadth, the reader is marched along too strict a chronological path or the author gets stuck in an etymological quagmire. But McMahon succeeds. This book is deeply researched, tightly argued and sparklingly written. It ought to be read by anyone interested in equality, and also anyone interested in people, history, God, politics, religion, nationalism, war or love.
Intervals is an exceptional book, for which every deserved superlative seems cliched, in part because the language of illness, death and bereavement often feels too hollowed out by use to accommodate the magnitude of those experiences. Frequently repeated words may gain a carapace that resists our scrutiny: take “dignity”, for example, which Marianne Brooker regards with “mild suspicion” as “too clean-cut and classed”, with “none of the chaos that makes us human”.
Andrew Stauffer’s book is a sound introduction to many aspects of Byron’s life, and the selected letters (varying from an almost real-time report on seductions in a stately home to Byron’s despatches from the hectic and disease-ridden Greek port in which he was to die) allow the reader to see something of the chronic restlessness and contrarianism of the man.