The oddness of their experience stayed with them. Later, returning to the palace to retrace their steps, they found this impossible. Buildings had changed, lanes had disappeared, and the bridge was no longer present. In fact, the whole layout was unfamiliar. Through diligent research, Morison and Lamont came to believe that, on that fateful day, somehow they had experienced the grounds as they had been in the late eighteenth century, and that the lady they had come across had been the infamous Queen Marie Antoinette.
The story was so extraordinary that they decided to document a full account in book form. That account, titled An Adventure, was published in 1911. It became the literary sensation of its day, running to numerous editions. As incredible as the tale was, perhaps the most astonishing part was yet to be revealed, for Morison and Lamot did not exist. The real authors of An Adventure were Eleanor Jourdain and Charlotte Moberly, the Principal and Vice-Principal, respectively, of St Hugh’s College, University of Oxford—two highly esteemed academics hiding their names to protect their identities.
Yet it is the incidental quality of shopping scenes that draws me to them. Rather than plot, they provide texture—the thickening of a world. In them, characters let down their guard. The low-stakes ritual offers up a moment of respite, even while storyline is breathing down one’s neck. Shop often figure as a kind of threshold in literature—between the known and the unknown; between ordinary life and adventure—an in-between zone.
Inevitably, in the middle of the night, as I had every other night, I had to pee. After a few minutes of trying to convince myself I could just go back to sleep, I unzipped my bag, stumbled out beyond the circle of expeditioners to do my business, and then slipped back in again.
Except that my sleeping bag wouldn’t zip. I tugged. I swore. I burrowed down again as far as I could, groped for my hot water bottle, tried to lie on the bag in such a way that my weight would hold it shut.
Born as part of the initial wave of modern feminism that emerged during the 19th and early 20th centuries with suffrage at its center, the radical ideologies debated at Heterodoxy gatherings extended well beyond the scope of a women’s right to vote. In fact, Heterodoxy had only one requirement for membership: that a woman “not be orthodox in her opinion.”
How worthy of respect is a justice system that focuses on retribution rather than protection of the community and the rehabilitation of perpetrators? It is a subject that demands more political and public attention than it gets.
Of course, the purpose of a novel is to entertain, but there is no reason why a serious subject cannot be examined in a compelling manner. With What I Would Do to You, Harper explores in some depth the pros and cons of an important issue in an engaging and affecting way. That is quite an achievement and definitely deserving of your attention.
The real world doesn’t deliver adversity in novel-sized chapters. Rarely do we enjoy perfect hindsight or the ability to glean meaning from violence or misfortune. In that sense, the unforgiving Ireland of Colin Barrett’s new novel, Wild Houses, feels uncomfortably familiar in its complexity and matter-of-fact ruthlessness.
The idea that experience needs to be ratified by reflection is central to Ernaux’s literary project. Time is circular. Experience is renewable. Nothing is lost, and every action makes a long shadow of reflection.
Becca Rothfeld is a dynamo. I had not come across her before picking up All Things Are Too Small and was unprepared for the book’s extraordinary clout and reach. She is an American journalist (a contributor to the New Yorker and the New York Times and a critic on the Washington Post), a philosopher, polemicist and a wit. She challenges, in this bracing, original and intellectually poised collection of essays, many of our unquestioning modern assumptions and, most persuasively, takes aim at the promotion of minimalism as an ideal for our living spaces, novels and ourselves.
The first sign that “Molly” is not going to be a typical memoir arrives on Page 20. That’s when the author, Blake Butler, finds himself on his hands and knees in agony beside his wife, whose body he has found in wild grass after she has ended her life with a handgun. It is at this moment that he is stung by a bee — the first bee sting of his life — on his right eyelid. It is as if the universe is declaring: Here is some extra awfulness, friend, just for you.
“Molly” carries on in this fashion. It’s an atrocity exhibition. Butler taps a vein of garish and almost comic malevolence that keeps flowing.