Jenny Hendrix

In his essay “Why Look At Animals?” John Berger mourns the lost reciprocity of human-animal exchange. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, he writes, animals were not just meat, leather, and horn, but “with man at the centre of his world.” As animate metaphors, they could explain the mysterious. As distant relatives, they represented where we had come from and where we would return at life’s end. As separate from us, they were a way for our world to look back.

“Magnificence,” the final installment in Lydia Millet’s interconnected sequence of novels, teems with turn-of-the-century emissaries from this vanishing natural world. The glass eyes of Millet’s bestiary aren’t able to return a look — they are long dead, lost, extinct — yet Millet negotiates a reunion of sorts regardless. In the turmoil of one woman’s middle age, these lost ones become a way of discovering what can be and should be saved in a world where all life, and all hope, is endangered. [Read more…]

FINISH THIS BOOK

BY KERI SMITH

The London of Zadie Smith’s long-awaited fourth novel, called “NW” after the northwest corner of the city - also the author’s home - is a fluid, mercurial thing. More than a city, it’s a city’s consciousness she’s written here. But while her novel maps its lurches and veerings, it also uncovers a fixedness - the way places never really change except in how, and by whom, they are read. “At some point we became aware of being ‘modern,’ of changing fast,” Smith writes, and yet it is the thing that’s aware - that “we” and “you” and “I” and the rest - in which she’s interested here.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/books/article/NW-by-Zadie-Smith-3866733.php#ixzz27DCiUVF3

One interesting thing about a 70-year war is that, for those fighting it, it’s no longer interesting at all. Violence is just another form of monotony. Exhausted and dull of spirit, the soldier tries to keep herself awake “with sex, with hurt, with shocking newspaper articles, sometimes.” This, at least, is Israel’s war as Shani Boianjiu paints it in her elegantly written debut novel, “The People of Forever Are Not Afraid,” the story of three girls coming of age — if you can call it that — in the Israeli Defense Forces. More than that, though, the 25-year-old Boianjiu, drawing on her own years with the IDF, has written the story of a people’s resignation to living in a world that’s been strange for so long, they can no longer remember how strange it is.

Read more: http://forward.com/articles/162806/life-during-wartime/#ixzz27DByJv5m

The town that I grew up in holds what people like to call, with a kind of pride in poverty, the World’s Shortest Parade on the fourth of July. A number of small towns make similar claims, but our parade, next to the beach on Maxwelton Road in Clinton, Washington, deserves it. From the field by the old Steiner farm it continues just two blocks, ending at Dave Mackie park, where a series of foot, sack, and three-legged races are run and the national anthem sung. It’s not required to register in advance to march; one simply arrives and lines up in either a motorized or non-motorized line. This year, the parade’s ninety-seventh iteration, the lineup included a number of dogs, a few Republicans, one guy in a gorilla suit, many bikes (some of them “Occupied”) and a truck full of violinists. As we waited for the start, a bored-looking high school baseball team called the Crabs slouched, chins in hand, on their hay bales, and a grandmotherly woman in a mermaid costume had her picture taken with one of two groups of pirates.

The elderly mermaid recalled the parade I’d been to at Coney Island just a week or two before—a different sea creature altogether, though the two shared a spirit of outlandish regionalism, that freak-flag-flying of place. I tried to cross Surf Avenue behind the parade and found myself buffaloed into a series of barricades, pressed between a big man in a too-small thong and an overwhelmed trash can. Watching the floats inch down the street over someone’s wig, I began to wonder what it was we saw in this custom. Certainly the metaphorical use of the word parade—as to describe, for instance, a haughty way of walking through a room or any series of nasty things (vices, celebrities, horrors) being overtly displayed in succession—points toward an underlying cultural ambivalence about the whole thing. [Read more…]

Early on in “The Chaperone,” Laura Moriarty’s fourth novel, it becomes clear that Cora Carlisle is fighting a losing battle. Her charge is Louise Brooks, soon-to-be silent-film star and something of a force of nature. As the critic Kenneth Tynan wrote, Brooks was “a creature of impulse, a creator of impulses, a temptress with no pretensions, capable of dissolving into a giggling fit at a peak of erotic ecstasy, … with that sleek jet cloche of hair that rings such a peal of bells in my subconscious.” Moriarty’s Louise is only 15, a Jazz Age lost girl playing uncertainty as brashness, but impulse and temptation are already in bloom. [Read more…]