15 READS
Bodies: celestial and human
Mise-en-scène
Playfulness
Correspondences
MEI-MEI BERSSENBRUGGE
A TREATISE ON STARS
A poetic meditation on being, on the interconnectedness between earth and the cosmos. Bodily energy and star energy emanate, dissolving ‘separation at the particle level.’
Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, A Treatise on Stars, New Directions Publishing, 2020.
A poetic meditation on being, on the interconnectedness between earth and the cosmos. Bodily energy and star energy emanate, dissolving ‘separation at the particle level’. Titled as a treatise, which describes not only a tract, but historically relates to healing, hence the word treated, Berssenbrugge’s brief poetic meditations allow us to enter into another kind of knowing which is visual, sentient, empathetic, immense. In her view, time is permeable, the ego is irrelevant, and life can thrive in a constant exchange of energies – if we allow it.
Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, A Treatise on Stars, New Directions Publishing, 2020.
A poetic meditation on being, on the interconnectedness between earth and the cosmos. Bodily energy and star energy emanate, dissolving ‘separation at the particle level’. Titled as a treatise, which describes not only a tract, but historically relates to healing, hence the word treated, Berssenbrugge’s brief poetic meditations allow us to enter into another kind of knowing which is visual, sentient, empathetic, immense. In her view, time is permeable, the ego is irrelevant, and life can thrive in a constant exchange of energies – if we allow it.
NONA FERNANDEZ & NATASHA WIMMER
VOYAGER
The Atacama Desert, famous for star gazing, was also the place where twenty-six people were executed by Pinochet’s regime. It is here that Fernández joins a ceremony to mark those lives as their names are symbolically bestowed upon a constellation of stars.
Nona Fernández and Natasha Wimmer, Voyager: Constellations of Memory, Daunt Books, 2023.
The Atacama Desert, famous for star gazing was also the place where twenty-six people were executed by Pinochet’s regime. It is here that Fernández joins a ceremony to mark those lives as their names are symbolically bestowed upon a constellation of stars. Interwoven within her accounting of this event is a kaleidoscopic encounter with personal and national memory, of loss and the fragmentary recovery of recent history which are encapsulated in Fernández’s mother’s disappearing memory and the author’s own relationship with the past.
Nona Fernández and Natasha Wimmer, Voyager: Constellations of Memory, Daunt Books, 2023.
The Atacama Desert, famous for star gazing was also the place where twenty-six people were executed by Pinochet’s regime. It is here that Fernández joins a ceremony to mark those lives as their names are symbolically bestowed upon a constellation of stars. Interwoven within her accounting of this event is a kaleidoscopic encounter with personal and national memory, of loss and the fragmentary recovery of recent history which are encapsulated in Fernández’s mother’s disappearing memory and the author’s own relationship with the past.
Ray Bradbury
The Illustrated Man
It is at night, as the illustrated man sleeps that the stories tattooed over his body flicker into life. Rivers and mountains, rockets and the expanse of the Milky Way, groups of people whose murmuring voices play out the stories etched onto his body.
Ray Bradbury, The Illustrated Man, Flamingo, 2005.
It is at night, as the illustrated man sleeps that the stories tattooed over his body flicker into life. Rivers and mountains, rockets and the expanse of the Milky Way, groups of people whose murmuring voices play out the stories etched onto his body. Enacting moments in the lives of those who travel to outer space and those who remain earthbound, they speak of love, violence and redemption. Written at the height of the Cold War and the machinations of McCarthyism, the darkness within the majority of the stories is tempered by a sense of our common humanity and a rye playfulness.
Italo Calvino
THE COMPLETE COSMICOMICS
Travelling through millennia and across galaxies the creation of the universe is relayed in playful inter-related stories from the Big Bang to the appearance of the dinosaurs and beyond into infinity.
Italo Calvino, translated by Martin McLauglin, Tim Parks, William Weaver, The Complete Cosmicomics, Penguin Classics, 2010.
Travelling through millennia and across galaxies the creation of the universe is relayed in playful inter-related stories from the Big Bang to the appearance of the dinosaurs and beyond into infinity. Drawing as much upon scientific facts as Greek mythology, literature, philosophy and contemporary culture, Calvino lets himself loose, seamlessly melding flights of his riotous imagination, parody and word play with mathematics, cosmology and literary forms where OULIPO, meets Alice in Wonderland, Danté meets Conrad and elements appear which later manifest in Invisible Cities.
Natasha Trethewey Bellocq’s Ophelia
It’s November 1910 when Ophelia begins her story, telling of her life in the rural South, her arrival in New Orleans where she, with her education and pale skin inherited from her white father, hopes to find work.
Natasha Trethewey, Bellocq’s Ophelia, Graywolf Press, 2012
It’s November 1910 when Ophelia begins her story, telling of her life in the rural South, her arrival in New Orleans where she, with her education and pale skin inherited from her white father hopes to find work. She tells how, when reduced to near starvation through lack of employment, she is picked up by a brothel Madame and how she is displayed to be photographed by E. J. Bellocq. Inspired by the photographs of prostitutes Bellocq made in the red-light district of New Orleans, Trewethy’s creation whom she names Ophelia vividly arises from the page. This composition of a portrait in verse gives voice to those voiceless women whose names and fates remain unknown, their existence living on only in their likeness captured in photographs.
Pamela BROWN
The Swish of the Curtain
‘It was Monday morning and they sat in the hall with pencil and paper’… ‘They’ are seven children who, at a loose end during the school holidays, set to work planning the transformation of an abandoned chapel into the Blue Door Theatre.
Pamela Brown, The Swish of the Curtain (1941), Pushkin Children’s Books, 2018
‘It was Monday morning and they sat in the hall with pencil and paper’… ‘They’ are seven children who, at a loose end during the school holidays, set to work planning the transformation of an abandoned chapel into the Blue Door Theatre, in which they will not only perform their own plays, but design their own sets, make their own costumes and write their own music. Its success builds strong theatrical ambitions amongst the children much to their parents disapproval. But with the belief and encouragement of a kindly Bishop, along with their talents and spirited determination, they are able to share and pursue the transformative powers of their imaginations. The author was remarkably only 14 when she wrote this novel in 1941, the seven children perhaps her kindred spirits.
Virginia Woolf
Between the Acts
On the eve of the Second World War, a pageant is enacted in the grounds of a country house. Fragments of gossip relayed, overheard moments in conversations, discontinuous reflections, form a spiky, interrupted narrative.
Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts, Penguin Classics, 2000
On the eve of the Second World War, a pageant is enacted in the grounds of a country house. Fragments of gossip relayed, overheard moments in conversations, discontinuous reflections, form a spiky, interrupted narrative expressing the thoughts and feelings of the characters which are played out mainly between the acts of the pageant. The novel reads as an urgent examination of the English; their character and history, literally reflecting a society that is class-ridden and patriarchal as the actors hold up mirrors reflecting the audience back to themselves in the closing moments of the play. Written during the war and completed not long before Woolf’s death, the novel also expresses her fear of the imminent destruction of a people and their history.
NagUIb Mahfouz
The Quarter
Cairo’s Gamaliya hara (quarter) is the setting for these eighteen stories. Familiar territory for Mahfouz, but in this volume the hara describes the span of human experience in tightly worked miniatures in which the local expresses the universal.
Nagiub Mahfouz, translated by Roger Allan, The Quarter, Saqi Books, 2019.
Cairo’s Gamaliya hara (quarter) is the setting for these eighteen stories. Familiar territory for Mahfouz, but in this volume the hara describes the span of human experience in tightly worked miniatures in which the local expresses the universal. This is where all facets of life play out, each, like the hara itself with its winding narrow alleys opening into communal gathering places, an articulation of all that lies hidden until fate suddenly exposes.
Annie Ernaux
Happening
Ernaux recounts the story of her unwanted pregnancy as a young student in France in 1963, and the shame and trauma that has since haunted her of the illegal abortion she was forced to undergo.
Annie Ernaux, translated by Tanya Leslie, Happening, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2022.
‘Maybe the true purpose of my life’, Ernaux writes, ‘is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing, in other words, something intelligible, universal’. In this way Ernaux recounts the story of her unwanted pregnancy as a young student in France in 1963, and the shame and trauma that has since haunted her of the illegal abortion she was forced to undergo. Pieced together from journal entries, memories and the sensations recalled within her body, this is a powerful, honest account which as Ernaux indicates is the experience of so many young women forced to seek these desperate measures when systems fail them.
HD
HERmione
HD’s novel is a thinly veiled account of her own search for freedom from familial and patriarchal restrictions, a search in which she feels her way towards achieving self-expression and autonomy.
HD, HERmione, New Directions Publishing, 2022
HD’s novel is a thinly veiled account of her own search for freedom from familial and patriarchal restrictions, a search in which she feels her way towards achieving self-expression and autonomy. Life events are described in imagist prose expressing her observations of family, friends and lovers, and her own complex feelings, often relayed as if seen from a distance. This auto-fictional account of her intense inner life and desires culminates in HER finally being able to live life on her own terms.
Vanessa Onwuemezi Dark Neighbourhood
The seven short stories that make up Vanessa Owuemezi’s debut collection are more like fragments, openings or ruptures than stories per se, visceral and often hallucinatory in the worlds they conjure.
Vanessa Onwuemezi, Dark Neighbourhood, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2021
‘To live in a world filled with light is like being slowly erased. No longer knowing down or up, yes or no, day or a true night. Light upon light is darkness.’ The seven short stories that make up Vanessa Owuemezi’s debut collection are more like fragments, openings or ruptures than stories per se, visceral and often hallucinatory in the worlds they conjure. As with the opening story, Dark Neighbourhood, which gives its title to the collection, time and place are ambiguous, estranged, fraught, edgy, liminal, unfolding in possible near futures where characters such as GG, Savina, Stevi, Cuba and Winner confront the limits of self, of love, of communal bonds and care for one another: ‘We are all alike in this strangeness.’
Javier Mariás
Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me
Finally, the meal is over, the child is in bed asleep, and Marta and Victor are about to embark on an affair, but Marta dies in Victor’s arms.
Javier Mariás, translated by Margaret Jull Costa, Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me, Penguin Modern Classics, 2012.
Finally, the meal is over, the child is in bed asleep, and Marta and Victor are about to embark on an affair, but Marta dies in Victor’s arms. Rather than compromising her, Victor steals away into the Madrid night, but tormented by his actions, wondering particularly what became of the child, he turns detective to piece together events prior to and after Marta’s death. Scenes and memories are relayed in forensic detail, where undercurrents of Spain’s past break through into the present, where no-one is whom they at first appear to be, as Victor the ghostwriter ghosts Marta’s street and her family, finally learning of another death, an almost murder.
Marit Kapla
Osebol
The village in the forest is mapped as a constellation of squares representing each speaker’s house, building relations between the villagers as each speaker relates moments of their life story.
Marit Kapla, translated by Peter Graves, Osebol: Voices from a Swedish Village, Allen Lane, 2021.
The village in the forest is mapped as a constellation of squares representing each speaker’s house, building relations between the villagers as each speaker relates moments of their life story. The concerns, pleasures and day-to-day lives of this small community are iterated on the page as they were spoken to Kapla, herself a one-time resident of Osebol. We learn of the difficulties of living in a remote rural community: the isolation, de-population, changes in working opportunities, rural schooling. The village is also presented as a place of refuge, a place with a remembered history and continuity down the generations. We hear about the pleasures of berry picking, and intergenerational family feuds, a commune, incomers, those who embrace change and those who decry the passing of the old ways. Quiet, personal, moving, engrossing, this collection of voices expresses what it is to live in a fast-changing world, yet where the timeless river, the howling wolves and night sky are ever present.
Perhat Tursun
The Backstreets
A young Uyghur office worker walks the streets of Ürümchi in search of a room for the night. Shrouded in fog, both real and metaphorical, the city becomes the mise-en-scène for memories of his rural childhood in the Uyghur Autonomous Region.
Perhat Tursun, translated by Darren Byler, The Backstreets: A Novel from Xinjiang, Columbia University Press, 2022
A young Uyghur office worker walks the streets of Ürümchi in search of a room for the night. Shrouded in fog, both real and metaphorical, the city becomes the mise-en-scène for memories of his rural childhood in the Uyghur Autonomous Region, his alienating schooling in Beijing and the current inhumane treatment he endures from his Han boss. As the night progresses, this un-named man becomes increasingly confused as his thoughts lurch in and out of his own dark reality to near hallucination or a descent into madness. Influenced by Camus, Tursun is the foremost Uyghur writer. Imprisoned in 2018, his whereabouts are currently unknown.
Antoine de Saint Exupéry
Wind, Sand and Stars
Drawing upon his own experiences of flying the first mail routes across the Sahara, Saint Exupéry’s poetic narrative interweaves episodes from his life with accounts of the dangers of those pioneering years of flight.
Antoine de Saint Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars, Penguin Classics, 2000
Drawing upon his own experiences of flying the first mail routes across the Sahara, Saint Exupéry’s poetic narrative interweaves episodes from his life with accounts of the dangers of those pioneering years of flight. Whether flying through the firmament between solid earth and the night sky or stranded and near to death under the stars in the desert, his experiences cause him to consider the nature of human endeavour and the very meaning of human existence, which appear later in fictional form as ‘The Little Prince’.