BOOK OF THE WEEK
On Morrison by Namwali Serpell
When Toni Morrison died in 2019, aged 88, there was a huge outpouring of admiration from fellow writers: the novelist Tayari Jones was not an outlier when she wrote that Morrison was “the greatest chronicler of the American experience that we have ever known”. Now, with Namwali Serpell, Morrison – who did not suffer fools gladly – has finally met her critical match. Serpell’s book On Morrison not only shows us how to read her “with the seriousness that she deserves”, writes Sara Collins in her rave review, but also matches her grand style with a flair of its own: this is “criticism as jazz… seemingly infinite in range, breathtakingly original, improvisational and self-aware”.
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WHAT TO READ NEXT
Cherry Blossom at Nightbreak by Rishi Dastidar
Do poets take themselves too seriously? The implied answer from this surreal, subversive, playful collection is: yes! In Dastidar’s world, “balloons are sentient”, a tuna fish sandwich becomes an obsession, and aliens and ghosts are plentiful. Jade Cuttle, who selected Cherry Blossom at Nightbreak as her poetry book of the month, writes: “Though poets of the present follow in footsteps of the past, Dastidar suggests, we are not obliged to tread the same track. Instead, we can ‘put down a role, skip fate’s / protestations, let white water / wash away everything / but the here and now’.” We can, in other words, have some serious fun.
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Tarantula by Eduardo Halfon
The central events of this autofictional work by the Guatemalan writer Eduardo Halfon take place at a Jewish children’s camp where the narrator and his brother stay one December. There, a game is set up, in which the camp’s counsellors play the roles of Nazis and the children their Jewish victims. Halfon’s primary concern, Chris Power writes in his paperback of the week review, “seems not to be with establishing facts, as a memoirist might, but to rappel as deeply as possible into those crevasses where meaning and truth disappear”. This “short, dense puzzle of a book” comes highly recommended.
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ENDNOTES
Anthony Cummins writes:
Publisher, novelist, small-press champion and soon-to-be memoirist (The Wrong Man is released on 29 May), Neil Griffiths is a busy man. I caught up with him while he scarfed down lunch having just given a keynote speech to a publishing conference in central London, shortly before he announced this year’s longlist for the Queen Mary small press prize, formerly known as the Republic of Consciousness prize. Unusually, the prize, now in its 10th year, gives money not to the winning writer but to the publisher whose book is nominated. Griffiths told me he was glad to see the back of the prize’s “ludicrous name”, but where did it come from in the first place? He explained almost sheepishly that he conceived it after he had been reading philosophical texts on theory of mind, before his own mind was blown by Mathias Énard’s single-sentence novel Zone and Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing. These led him to form the view that “the only way of sharing consciousnesses is through a particular kind of writing”. And a particular kind of publishing to bring it to readers.
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Illustration by Charlotte Durance
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