Finally, Noémi Lefebvre ’s wonderfully-absurdist POETICS OF WORK (Les Fugitives), a book with a wandering, unemployed, poet-narrator in a tussle with the values of late capitalism, felt precise and apt for our times. I devoured both Gail McConnell’s THE SUN IS OPEN (Penned in the Margins), about her father who was murdered by the IRA in 1984, and photographer/filmmaker/writer Moyra Davey’s LES GODDESSES/HEMLOCK FOREST (Dancing Foxes Press, 2017), based on two of Davey’s related projects. In REAL ESTATE (Hamish Hamilton), the last in Deborah Levy’s trilogy of ‘living autobiographies’, the writer considers what it takes for a woman to claim her space, in private and in public. Guibert’s book documents his AIDS diagnosis Zambreno adopts a similar bodily immediacy, recording the pregnant body the ill body the body under capitalism the pandemic body (much of the work is written in real time during 2020). I loved Kate Zambreno’s TO WRITE AS IF ALREADY DEAD (Columbia University Press), which is in conversation with Hervé Guibert’s TO THE FRIEND WHO DID NOT SAVE MY LIFE. (On suggestions made concerning his play, Flaubert writes: ‘I have refused categorically, because I think all that is facile, cheap and it offends my aesthetic sense.’) Approaching this winter with some trepidation, I recently read and admired Jessica Au’s COLD ENOUGH FOR SNOW (Fitzcarraldo)– a beautifully written, elegantly paced and quietly poignant novel. They also show emotional states that shape a writing life: excitement at new ideas, despair at lack of progress, anxiety about the reception of the work, wonderful bursts of ego. In these letters I found gossip, frustration with war and politics, acts of tenderness (‘I embrace you’ – is how they signed off), bouts of depression, and certain words that made me flinch. The complete correspondence (edited and translated by Barbara Beaumont) maps the intimacy between the two authors after meeting in Paris in 1863. Sometime during this past year’s bleak European winter, I read FLAUBERT & TURGENEV, A FRIENDSHIP IN LETTERS. Too many poetry books, but NOTES ON THE SONNETS by Luke Kennard (Penned in the Margins) made me feel seen as the odd human animal we all are, EAT OR WE BOTH STARVE by Victoria Kennefick (Carcanet) is visceral bliss, AUNTY UNCLE POEMS by Gboyega Odubanjo (Smith|Doorstop) is the actual best, and POOR by Caleb Femi (Penguin) changed everything. Late to the party, I read and loved Maggie Nelson’s THE ARGONAUTS (Melville House): radical intertextual discourse and romantic ass-fucking on the first page – what’s not to love? JEWS DON’T COUNT by David Baddiel (TLS) was a deeply personal read, moving me to confront my own feelings of Jewish shame. ![]() Similarly devastating: NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT THIS by Patricia Lockwood (Bloomsbury) reveals a world painfully recognisable, utterly surprising and finally, deeply moving. I was blown away by Natasha Brown’s ASSEMBLY (Hamish Hamilton): a searing account of everyday othering from both the maligned and the well-intentioned, with passages of staggering beauty and an ending that slayed me. A remarkable encounter with a book whose narrative is built from a singular question: where can the mind go when the body reaches its maximum threshold of experience? And from another time completely (1915) I read for the first time this year Jack London’s STAR ROVER. I also got a lot from Harry Sword’s book/long form playlist MONOLITHIC UNDERTOW (White Rabbit), which surveys the leaking of what seems like a singular drone through genres, epochs and ideologies. ![]() The essential contribution here is that to aestheticise politics is, under the right circumstance, not to decorate or to inappropriately beautify it, but rather an essential mechanism to make it sensible. An undeviating announcement of the subversive potential of contemporary aesthetic practices. Much closer to my filter bubble is Eyal Weizman and Matthew Fuller’s INVESTIGATIVE AESTHETICS (Verso). Kim Ghattas and I may be in parallel ideological lanes and yet the cluster-fuck constellation she accumulates around 1979, in her book BLACK WAVE (Wildfire), is a revelation (not least because we may finally have the answer here to who killed Moussa Sadr). The White Review depends upon the support of its readers, and with your support we’ll continue to create space for new art and writing in 2022 and beyond. This year, we’re taking our annual fundraiser online. Members of THE WHITE REVIEW editorial team, contributors and friends of the magazine reveal the books they’ve been reading and revisiting in 2021.
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