Non-fiction
Attack of the Numinous
Robinson may be the moderate face of American religiosity, but she takes some pretty wild swings. The more you read her essays, the more it becomes apparent that she is positing a few simplicities of her own. Whatever manifestation of modern thought she happens to be criticising, her argument is basically the same: she proposes, in essence, that such thinking is too narrow, that it ignores or denies aspects of lived experience, and that its understanding of human nature must therefore be considered inadequate. She returns again and again to the core claim that modern thought is, as she puts it in Absence of Mind (2012), a ‘closed circle’ — by which she means, quite specifically, that its assumptions do not and indeed cannot account for her personal experience of religious belief, her intuition that the universe is a place of wonder and abundant meaning.
A Place of Punishment: No Friend But the Mountains by Behrouz Boochani
pro-refugee sentiment within Australia has tended to find institutional expression in particular pockets of liberal sentiment – one of which has been the infrastructure of Australian literature. That’s the context for Boochani’s book, a text that emerges from a scaffolding of literary activism that it itself helped facilitate.’
Where Someone Else Lives: Alan Mayne’s Slums
The word ‘slum’ carries powerful associations. Maybe it brings to mind nineteenth-century tenements, or Dickensian poverty. Or perhaps it summons images of the poor today, living in favelas or shanty towns. Alan Mayne’s new book suggests that we think of the slum as a global injustice: not the existence of squalid living conditions, but the word ‘slum’ itself. He believes the term has been weaponised against the poor, and should not be used.
To Resilience – and Beyond!
In Li’s, Friedmann’s and Febos’ work, the polyvocal I draws together facets of self and subjectivity, braiding them, while unbraiding simpler notions of a singular, truthful I. As reticence and disclosure speak together, or loss and hope, or the I and we of postmemory and of empathy, form becomes capacious. Like Febos’ ‘Abandon Me’, each of these works proceeds piece by piece like a poem, stanza by stanza, assays that get where they do by breaking both linear narrative and certainty, and by reassembling the smashed pieces to see what light they might shed and what delight they might preface.
A Mole, A Viper, A Toad: Brian Dillon’s Essayism
What is Essayism? Its writer admits to us that he has ‘no clue how to write about the essay as a stable entity or established class, how to trace its history diligently from uncertain origins through successive phases of literary dominance’ – and praise be for that. The book is instead a series of attempts, of essays, of course, at delineating or describing the form.