Reviews
Saved by Books
In Childhood, Shannon Burns quickly turns to speculation about why he, ‘a child of the welfare class’, managed, after his tumultuous early years, to find an exit route into the educated middle class, especially where many of his family members have not. I know for a fact that this is a question that plagues many people who grew up in similar circumstances to Burns, and it’s a question that I have posed and attempted to answer myself.
Literary Migrations
Sakr’s novel is teeming with the feelings of its characters: anger, despondency, ambivalence, shame, joy; with cousins, uncles, aunts, grandparents, and school friends; with Arabic and Turkish phrases: Jamal has Lebanese family in and near Lurnea in Western Sydney, and an estranged Turkish one; with familial expectations; with violence, both threatened and enacted; with sexual acts that transgress cultural proscriptions; and with a shifting, sometimes lush literary style.
Calling Bullshit
The gimmick, is, therefore, perhaps the aesthetic category that captures the affective experience of life as mediated by the capital relation. The gimmick names the ambivalent judgement by which we come to apprehend the very process through which capitalism reproduces itself, and the abstractions that naturalise that process. When we judge something to be a gimmick, we are experiencing ‘dissatisfaction—mixed, for all this, with fascination—linked to our perception of an object making untrustworthy claims about the saving of time, the reduction of labor, and the expansion of value’.
For There She is, Out of the Shadow
The underlying structures that led to Woolf’s thinly veiled racist depiction of Daisy in Mrs Dalloway have reconfigured to shape Mina’s existence in the world as a woman writer of colour. Writing Daisy’s story is a way for Mina to push back and resist the daily draining forces of racism and sexism. Writing is revival, ‘I know what I have to do: tracking her voice, channelling her vibe; that is what matters’, Mina hypes herself, adding ‘[r]esearch seems to work when I’m stuck, turning history, allowing the creative nexus to thrive, to flower, for Daisy to intone leaving her husband, her son, and her household behind.’.
Seeking Derangement
In her presentation of Anja, Howell has fallen into a contemporary trap, which is to presume that in modern literature a woman losing it is inherently understandable. That to shoulder a great emotional burden makes a female character three-dimensional and complex. Rather, Anja who apparently has always operated on a self-sufficient basis, continues over the course of this book to isolate herself and to consider herself set apart from the world.