Do you believe in ghosts? Do you believe that unhappy spirits can walk, slam doors, go bump in the night? Do you believe that objects can retain potency even, or perhaps especially, if violently uprooted from their culture of origin?
Here’s a less occult question: does anyone actually know what is in the British Museum (BM), that five-hectare compound, with its many-levelled 18th-century building plus its various outposts and stores? It is reputed to house eight million artefacts, not necessary fully catalogued, of which only a tiny fraction are displayed. As Noah Angell writes: “The British Museum is only marginally an exhibition space; in material terms it’s mostly a site of disappearance.” The objects disappear, and disappear again. This book closes just after the scandal broke about the hundreds of thefts from the museum, the subsequent sales on eBay, the resignations: proof, as the author has it, that the BM has no claim to being a safe steward of anyone’s cultural artefacts.
While we’re notoriously bad at intuiting how our minds organise phenomena like colours and smells, machines offer a potential route for outsourcing introspection, and doing it with rigour. They can be trained to mimic human performance on perceptual tasks, and they make available the internal representations they use to do this – the abstract spaces and coordinate frames in which the ineffable stuff of thought lives.
It’s surreal to review a book that made you feel physically sick. It’s even more surreal to give a book that made you feel that way a good review, to say that the nausea was somehow positive or warranted. But that’s the bind when writing about Lucas Rijneveld’s horrifying and brilliant sophomore novel, My Heavenly Favorite.
Thirst is, despite its slight missteps in structure, a visceral, powerful novel about the all-encompassing presence of death. For all that our majestic Gothic cemeteries are designed to distract us, in the midst of life, we are in death; in the midst of death, we are in life. Alive or undead, Yuszczuk reminds us, to be is to thirst.
Like all good memoirs — and this is an excellent one — “My Beloved Monster” is not always for the faint of heart. Because life is not for the faint of heart. But it is worth the emotional investment, and the tissues you will need by the end, to spend time with a writer and cat duo as extraordinary as Masha and Carr.