Reviews
Playing the Part, Telling the Tale: Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work
In the end, Playing the Whore is a book is about language, and in particular the way we use it to construct sex work as a field of knowledge and limit the control sex workers have over their own lives. It is about identifying sex work, not as something driven by male desire, but by the sex worker’s needs for housing, nourishment, access to healthcare, and even holiday time.
The novelist’s revenge: Joyful by Robert Hillman
Women lust and die in Robert Hillman’s Joyful, but not, it would appear, in the classic realist novel manner. Where a heroine such as Emma Bovary yearns, is seduced, and falls from grace, Joyful offers a twenty-first century update on that scenario. Women still die, but it is the men who love longest when all hope is gone.
Bad Faith: Religion without God by Ronald Dworkin
This short but ambitious book is more revealing of its author’s shortcomings than anything I have read by him. Notwithstanding its posthumous publication and the fact that, had he lived a bit longer, Dworkin may have sharpened up his arguments, I emerged from it with a powerful sense that he was pulling a philosophical fast one.
Second Murders: Report from the Interior by Paul Auster
In Report from the Interior, Auster describes the impact of his Jewishness on his remembering and subjectivity. He stands apart from the typical American boy he has hitherto imagined himself to be. His younger self does not attempt to resist this separateness. He refuses to blend in with the assumed and compulsory Christianity of his education.
Inward illumination: On Antigone Kefala
Kefala’s output is highly accomplished and highly individual. She seems, like all real writers, to have been clear about what she was doing from the very beginning, even when what she was doing involved a lot of uncertainties.
The complicity of silence: Kinder Than Solitude by Yiyun Li
Yiyun Li’s Kinder Than Solitude begins in a funeral parlour in contemporary Beijing with the unceremonious cremation of Shaoai, a woman who suffered serious brain damage 21 years earlier, but had ‘clung to a world that had neither use or a place for her’. As a 22 year old student, Shaoai had been involved in democratic protests in Beijing in 1989, for which she was expelled from university.
Free, compulsory and secular: Taking God to School by Marion Maddox
Taking God to School is instructive reading for anyone interested in understanding how we have reached the stage where towards a third of students attend private schools, nearly all of a religious character, with many receiving substantial support from the federal government. For Maddox, it has been downhill ever since the high water mark of public school attendance in the late 1970s.
A sentence is a half-formed thing
A Girl is a Half-formed Thing is a piece of high modernism a century on, recognisable in its stream-of-consciousness ways as using a version of the techniques practised by James Joyce, and also by Virginia Woolf, who might have approved its style but would have hated its subject matter.