Reviews
Small breaths: All That Is & Collected Stories by James Salter
All That Is is both sweeping – a man’s entire adult life is covered, beginning from the age of eighteen and ending in old age, just before serious illness might begin – and minute. Despite the span of time covered in the book, it is under 300 pages. It is a book of small breaths.
Bully-proof: John Kinsella
The quality of poetic thought in Armour is erratic. To a significant extent, it borrows the prestige of technical and specialist realms, while using devices that obscure meaning with the aim of suggesting a profundity beyond the commonplace. Despite the flexibility and richness of Kinsella’s associative powers, thought remains largely undeveloped, unassimilated, disembodied.
A dangerous cynicism: The Confidence Trap & The Last Vote
Electorates are not enamoured of the idea that the nation state now has such limited power over its destiny. Democracies dependent on foreign creditors; massive multinational companies subject to few democratic controls; an international financial market with the power to decide the strength of currencies – these things sit uneasily with the idea that a nation should be able to determine its own fate and the fate of its people.
In a poetry world: Home by Dark by Pam Brown
What a great title: Home by Dark. A mere three syllables that slide from warm to cool, from safe-haven to the unknown. By themselves these three words seem almost nonsensical, only grammatical when we imagine the sentences they might belong to, or have come from.
Notes on ‘Kamp’: My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard
At the centre of these books, then, is the paradox of a man trying to be objective about his own subjectivity. The paradox is inherent in any autobiographical endeavour, but there are a number of factors elevating Knausgaard’s intimate revelations above the common run of first-person narratives. The most obvious is the ambitious scale of the project.