But how are we to appreciate these machines of both menace and beauty? Are they simply inanimate tools for writing, and nothing more? Or are they relics of the most odious regime in human history—cursed forever to be symbols of the Third Reich where they were birthed? And if such objects were born with some kind of original sin, is there any hope for redeeming them?
The smell of frying onions is normal and ordinary. It’s nothing but a first stop in a dinner with a flashier destination.
What we overlook is that the smell of frying onions – as they brown, as the sugars come free, as they soften – is much more than a smell.
This is a novel that explores, among other things: chosen vs. blood family, artistry, work, the internet, capitalism, activism, communal living, class, elitism, exploitation, surveillance, lesbianism, bisexuality, memory, time, and the particular thrills and rigors of being a young person in New York City, or just being a person at all.
That’s a lot. Still, for the most part, Ko pulls it off, like one of those towering “Great British Baking Show” confections that defy gravity.
In Your Wild and Precious Life, Jensen asks: what transformation can take place, in the midst of “a misery that approaches madness”? She is a novelist, someone for whom “words metabolise thought”, and so on the plane, flying to see her son’s body, she writes a sort of prayer, or spell: “Raph, you are a force of nature, and now you are one with that force. You are water, you are chlorophyll, you are moss on a stone, a bird’s feather …”