Non-fiction

That the unit of the individual is too small to enact political transformation is the simple wager that Jodi Dean uses to open Comrade. It is a work of political theory that is well-timed, as neoliberal states have failed their citizens en masse and ideas such as solidarity and mutual aid have threatened to go mainstream in the West.

Reading the losses arrayed in this anthology to write this review – even as they were tempered by expressions of joy or hope at ecological resilience, or calls for action – I felt somewhat overwhelmed. In that state, I recalled the classic Freudian account of melancholy as a mourning of loss that becomes pathological, because it is perpetual.

These letters may refuse the methodological stringency of academic literary criticism, but beyond some epistolary scaffolding (an addressee, a conversational tone, questions answered or posed) they are largely close textual analyses performed by astute readers with comp lit bona fides and early-career positions at Yale, Princeton and Oxford.

Martin has been extraordinarily prolific over the years, and the book is far from a full summary of his achievement – but more than any single previous volume, it offers a broad overview of the range, energy and eloquence that make him one of the living film critics most worth reading. As a personal statement, it is characteristically both discreet and heart-on-sleeve: Martin does not write his private life in more than an occasional, anecdotal manner, but the intimate intensity of his passion for cinema shines out, like a beacon, from almost everything he has ever written.

These books lay bare the exhaustion occasioned by capitalism’s resource extraction, the unyielding walls of our workplaces and institutions, and the misogyny, latent or overt, of medical practice. In writing of their chronic and mental illnesses, the authors rupture the narrative that a successful body is a well body, and open a space for new and original accounts of how those bodies mediate the world.

Nonfiction-as-speculation feels oxymoronic. The two words tug against each other, ‘nonfiction’ leaning toward documentation, ‘speculation’ toward imagining. A strange hybrid genre results that strives to offset the bloodless abstraction of scientific projections and the future’s unreality.

Dispossession was hardwired into this ambitious housing program, at both the household and community level. Enter the anthropologist, Tess Lea. Darwin-born, Lea is an acute observer of the everyday practices that characterise the wild, disorderly, and strange cultural world of the interventionist settler-colonial state. This involves committed and forensic analysis of documentary hulk, reading and deciphering pages and pages of detailed policy paperwork that repel close attention. And it also involves fieldwork: immersion in the everyday ways under study.

I have used the word ‘magic’ to describe this book, and it occurs to me again that there is a spell at work here, an incantation as old as time, as fresh as a splash of clear water. Here are the stories of the world, he says; here is my story; here is theirs; here is yours. And they are all spinning together. Pay attention, for these distractions are not distractions; they are the substance of the story of everything. ‘There is an almost super-connectedness between events.’

Journalists like John Martinkus have risked their lives by reporting from West Papua. What they bring to readers are, to borrow Susan Sontag’s words, ‘full frontal views of the dead and dying’. For me, at the centre of The Road is the litany of a witness burdened by the gravity of knowing and seeing the dead in full frontal view. But the book shows that while writing has its virtue, it is not nearly enough. Sontag suggests that we should not take the ‘we’ for granted when ‘the subject is looking at other people’s pain,’ but what is clear is that the ‘they,’ the Papuans who are the living dead, dying under Indonesian persecution, also see and demand a response, an action. John Martinkus’s The Road: Uprising in West Papua magnifies their stories so that we not only see but act.

There are a lot of memorable episodes and images in Displaced. But memorability isn’t enough, in my mind, for a memoir to stand out. Something that can elevate a memoir beyond an account of lived experience (however skilfully told), and help it flourish as literature, is when it evokes and explores the mechanics of memory: when the story is built on how remembering through writing works. Kinsella is conscious of this possibility of memoir.