Review articles

Learn from my mistakes.

Audition – Katie Kitamura

This starts as a tense and austere description of an ambiguous relationship, as a young man comes into the life of a successful older actress. He’s a bit odd – his story doesn’t quite seem to add up. Just as I am wondering how things are going to progress, suddenly everything changes and the whole story is recast and effectively begins again. Like a rude awakening! From that point the story continues its highly strung narrative. The characters are in a pressure cooker and the pressure is unrelenting and things begin to unravel to some extent. The prose is claustrophobic and unrelenting and fascinating and the whole book is like a tiny self-contained world. When I finished it was like emerging into the daylight from a darkened cinema.

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The Trial

Orson Welles’ adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Trial was screened at the Capitol Cinema Film Club near my house. What an amazingly stylish film – it really played up the “nightmare” aesthetic. Everything looked a bit surreal, including Anthony Perkins who played the protagonist Josef K. The sets were incredible — where did Welles find them?

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Plumb — Maurice Gee

Plumb comprises the reminiscences of one George Plumb, covering the first half of the 20th century.  He starts out as a clergyman but his strict, even fanatical, adherence to his own idiosyncratic principles gets him into trouble with his church. Meanwhile he marries and has 12 children.

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BBQ Economics – Liam Dann

A pretty good explainer of economics, with a focus on how it affects you. Yes, you – the cost of living, savings, mortgages and the rest. The idea is that if you are at a barbecue and the discussion turns to money, you’ll know what you’re talking about if you read this book. I listen to Liam Dann on Radio NZ and his easygoing yet informative style comes across well here. I have read a few similar books and websites but it’s always good to have another angle on this endlessly interesting subject.

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Notes of a Native Son — James Baldwin

A compilation of pieces written from 1948 to 1955, all concerning contemporary African-American life and culture. The first part consists of various reviews: Baldwin is quite dismissive of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which he says is not a novel so much as a pamphlet. Seems funny to review a hundred-year-old book, but I guess it was relevant to the tumultuous times Baldwin was living in.

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The Way by Swann’s — Marcel Proust

This, volume 1 of a new(ish) edition of Proust’s magnum opus In Search of Lost Time, is slow-moving but totally immersive. So slow-moving that even the event that arguably kick-starts the whole extended novel, the famous episode where the narrator’s childhood memories bubble up after tasting a madeleine, doesn’t happen until about 40 pages in. And even then he spends a couple of pages struggling to remember before the memories start appearing.

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Freedom Regained – Julian Baggini

We do have free will, but it doesn’t necessarily mean what you think it means. Many conceptions of free will are just incoherent; if you think about it, free will can only mean that your decisions are consistent with your history and character. In this sense, we can have free will even if our actions are completely determined; an action can be free even if it could not have been any different.

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This Little Art – Kate Briggs

I love this book. The more I read about translating, the more interesting it seems. It combines close reading with creative writing, psychology (what did the author mean by that phrase? What will the reader understand by this translation?) and more. Whenever I read a translation, I seek out anything the translator has written about the translation process. They have to solve a dozen problems on every page – the ingenuity that goes into a translation is quite amazing.

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The Identity Trap – Yascha Mounk

Mounk makes the case here for classical liberal values, untainted by what he sees as the distorting effect of identity politics. It’s convenient to treat people as members of their identity groups, according to their racial characteristics, gender, etc. But this is only ever going to be a rule of thumb, an approximation to what we really want. For example, affirmative action policies are probably better than nothing, but we shouldn’t just then sit back and think our job is done. We don’t really want to give people benefits based purely on their identity groups; instead we want to base it on each person’s individual needs. This is much harder of course! We should recognise that identity group-based policies are just a rough-and-ready first attempt; they are not the best solution.

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Hope Without Optimism – Terry Eagleton

This is a collection of writings about hope, not really addressing optimism much other than to disparage it. I was hoping (without optimism) that it would be a bit more technical in nature, but instead it is quite discursive and pulls in references to pretty much everything you could think of and lots you couldn’t. Eagleton is vastly more well-read than I will ever be and I couldn’t really say he wears his learning lightly. Still, I enjoyed reading the book, getting lost in a few rabbit holes while looking up some of his offhand references. There is a lot in it.

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