Read
Visitation, Jenny Erpenbeck
Picked this up in the library as I read Kairos last summer and loved it, then I was pulled in by the perfect ratio of reviews balancing “5*…lyrical…beautiful” and “1* a disjointed mess”. Plus, reading this while (almost) out-museum-ing myself in Berlin with Abby sat beautifully within the history, place, and poetry of the novel.
There is something so arresting about the way Erpenbeck’s writing washes over you before, when you’re most comfortable in her lyricism, you find yourself crying on the tube.
Home! He’d cried out like a child that would give anything not to be seeing what it was seeing, but precisely in this one brief moment in which he hid his face in his hands, as it were, even this dutiful German official had known that home would never again be called Bavaria, the Baltic coast or Berlin, home had been transformed into a time that now lay behind him, Germany had been irrevocably transformed into something disembodied, a lost spirit that neither knew nor was forced to imagine all these horrific things. H-O-M-E.
If you also think that a first chapter structured around how the central character (a place, a land, a home) first comes to be via glacier and geology, is an excellent sign for a book, then you’ll enjoy this. Masterfully translated and as powerful in what it doesn’t say as what it does, this firmly establishes Erpenbeck as another writer I need to delve into the catalogue of.
A Sunny Place for Shady People, Mariana Enriquez
Another library find which I then couldn’t stop spotting in bookshops, I was ready to settle in for some good old-fashioned feminist/body horror/South American mysticism/make-me-have-weird-dreams short stories.
What I got instead was instead a bit watered down. As I sit to write this I can’t recall any of the stories particularly vividly, apart from one I really liked about fridges (and of course, murder, and ghosts). The collection might also have been structured in a way which didn’t quite land with me; the middle and later stories I definitely enjoyed more.
To say I was (unfairly) expecting something akin to Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties is probably a fair accusation, but overall these didn’t quite stick.
Replace Me, Amber Husain
Abby and I found this in do you read me, and I promised I’d send it to her once I finished (I’ll post it soon!!)
Speaking on the film, The Assistant, and its circular bureaucracy in seeking justice:
“For as long as the office is ruled by such acts of collective interpretation, its logics are as unassailable as an Other who doesn’t exist..”
My purchase cemented by a Chris Kraus endorsement on the front cover, I actually hadn’t finished it until quite recently. Husain has a wonderfully familiar yet wide-ranging references she draws on to discuss replaceability in all its guises; Maggie Nelson’s Argonauts appears, so does Mezzanine, and so does the paradox of Theseus’ ship.
It’s exactly the kind of essay writing I love. Working in a job where we often are comforted by our own replaceability within certain constraints, I thought it was sweeping in its scope.
At times (admittedly, perhaps at the moments when the references went over my head or didn’t feel as relevant) it reads rambling, but I hope it arrives safely in Paris soon so I can discuss with Abby.
Watched
A Real Pain, Jesse Eisenberg
All three of us in the flat liking the same film maybe tells you how deserving this film is of the review lexicon mainly consisting of ‘masterpiece’ and ‘effortless’. In fact, I quite loved how effort-ful Eisenberg’s depiction of himself and Kieran Culkin as Jewish-American cousins felt. It was such a pleasure to witness the little motifs, really smart videography, and Kieran Culkin being every character he’s ever been in one, intersect and tie up at the end to provide what you are sure is exactly the impact Eisenberg wanted you to sit in that cinema and feel.
In other words, this felt like a very filmy film (different to a capital ‘F’ Film, in case you were wondering). The humour did its job of placing the very real subject matter in accessible distance of the film’s audience, and I thought Eisenberg overall did it justice.
Listened to
I’m not always the biggest fan of Tortoise’s reporting, but their investigative journalism (as tongue-in-cheek as some of the editing feels) is reliably gripping. Lucky Boy is their latest and I’m intrigued to see where they go after these first few episodes.
I haven’t managed to listen to much else besides baby J, still, so I’ll just leave you with this.
Art and Theatre
I’m Not Okay
This was a self-described ‘emo retrospective’ which was eerily transportive, taking up only a small corner of the Barbican library.
I loved the self-submitted make up of the exhibition itself, and was particularly taken aback by how much 2000s/2010s tech they managed to pull together. The highest-impact item I saw was an old webcam; how many hours did we used to spend on piknik?
All About Love and Danger Came Smiling
These were two twin exhibition at the Hayward Gallery that Anna and I went to see. They’re both still on (and we got a free badge when we bought our ticket, if that sways you).
Linder’s exhibit made me want to collage anything and everything I own, but I found the uncanny pieces, where a table or record player obscures an otherwise blank corner of a photo, more interesting than the seemingly more intentionally placed floral/nude series.