When you describe yourself as a “writer” but your writing has become hard to find, it creates a crisis not just of profession, but identity. Who am I, if not my content? It is hard not to feel the disappearance of creative work as a different kind of death of the author, one in which readers can’t interpret my work because they can’t find it. It is a sort of fading away, of losing shape and relevance.
Then, on a shelf covered in dust, I found a small, heavy bottle made of thick brown glass. I went out to stand on the rutted dirt I would dig up and fill in with my Tonka bulldozer when I was a little girl. I unscrewed the tight lid and saw a shivering mirror. I knew it immediately, though I had seen mercury only once or twice before, when a thermometer broke. Does anyone forget its strangeness? I stared at the trembling wave of silver for a long time, all brightness in a world suddenly ashen and gray.
The little bottle sat on a shelf above my desk for more than twenty years. I resisted opening it, but did now and then, to see its ceaseless, shifting radiance. One day last summer, I found myself idly thinking about house fires, as one does when one has grown up around firefighters, and I imagined the little bottle exploding. The vaporous cloud, a dreadful gall. The firemen. It had come to me, and it was my charge to figure out what to do with this thing. I have no idea where my father got the bottle, but he liked his curiosities. I began to study how to get rid of it.
It was once thought that rods and cones were the only photoreceptive cells in our eyes. But at the turn of the millennium, researchers identified a different type of cell in the retina whose existence had been suspected since 1923, when geneticist Clyde Keeler noticed that the pupils of blind mice still dilated when exposed to light. These cells—named intrinsically photoreceptive retinal ganglion cells—have nothing to do with the formation of images.
They were going to be late — that much became clear as clouds gathered over São Tomé, a verdant island 190 miles off the coast of West Africa. The group of eight — six Americans and two Australians — had left its Norwegian Cruise Line ship that morning, March 27, for a day trip across the island. But they had car trouble on the way back. Time ticked by as they sat in the tropical heat waiting for a replacement car. “Call your boss,” the passengers urged their driver. “Tell him to call the ship.”
With his new novel, Niall Williams has created perhaps the most successful work of his career. Recalling Thomas Hardy in its deeply compassionate unravelling of moral crises set in the culture of the writer’s childhood rather than the reader’s present day – a time with a seemingly closer, more constricting relationship to moral absolutes and forbidden emotion – Time of the Child is a compellingly emotional experience that catches the breath and doesn’t let up until it reaches its final, dramatic conclusion.
Ali mutates from street-fighter to Trotskyist Zelig, popping up everywhere. After Southall, he finds himself interviewing Indira Gandhi, advising her that Pakistan was unlikely to invade Kashmir. He witnesses the fall of the Soviet Union, strikes up a friendship with Hugo Chávez, is a founding member in 2001 of the Stop the War Coalition and concludes with a passionate analysis of Gaza. For all its flaws, it’s a superbly bracing world tour, written by a historical materialist who turned 80 during the book’s composition, in which he is often insightful and usually correct in his analyses.