Book Review

Women on the Moon

Debora Kuan
The Word Works ($19)

by Julia Klahr

In Women on the Moon, Debora Kuan’s vulnerable new poetry collection, the author draws on her Asian-American heritage to explore the gravity rooting a woman’s life in an “imaginary firmament” by invoking the ethereal figure of Chang-e, the Chinese moon goddess. Divided into five “lunar phases” examining the place of women (particularly women of color) in contemporary American society, the book is a refreshing take on modern femininity that finds magic in the banal domesticity of the everyday.

Kuan’s free verse seems to signal the liberty of expansive contemplation, especially in the book’s “Gibbous” section. In recalling the myth of Chang-e’s path to immortality, the author casts a mystical light on her heritage:

Say a woman leaves you for the moon.
Say you discover after turning over the quilted

page, she’s drunken the elixir,
she’s gone—ghost of indented slippers, pulse

thumping beneath your birdless ribcage.

However, Kuan has no less praise for the corporeal, as in the pithy “Magic Lesson”:

. . . every woman
has been sawed in half
at least a dozen times
before sunset.

The book’s opening phase, “Last Quarter Moon: Mothering,” features “Having a Baby at 43,” a poem that portrays the speaker as apprehensive and vulnerable as she grapples with older motherhood. Following recent egregious displays of anti-Asian sentiment, “One Day in America” subtly evokes an Asian American mother’s fears while watching her child:

         when you catch sight of me,
you practice your wave, opening and shutting

your fist in the weighted air. Your nose and chin
and eyes are splattered with dark red

berry purée, as you kick your feet
in your highchair.

Here, Kuan tries to make sense of a horror-filled day in which the Asian-American spa workers to whom her book is dedicated were brutally killed. Kuan reinforces the devastating impact through enjambment, using meaningful line breaks to help carry the movement of thought. Her language, however, remains informal, with a natural cadence that makes it readable despite the difficult content.

The book’s next phase, “Full Moon: Coupling,” includes a foray into end-stopped and end-rhymed verse, where the interlaced quatrains of “Man & Wife” emphasize a sense of burdensome mundanity and exhaustion:

By dinner, we tear our bread with both hands,
forget candles, eat straight from the pan.
We ready our sorrys on hooks by the nightstands,
so we can reach them as quick as we can.

Images of married life’s predictability and dull routine, where “the complaints go on dripping, / stalactites in a dolomite cave,” continue in wry poems like “How to Live with Your Husband,” but in the book’s final section, Kuan’s speaker seems to embrace the joy of the ordinary in a series of still lifes. The brief tercets of “Still Life With Mushroom” feature deft use of alliteration (“cloud of cartilage”), internal rhymes (“the unsteady / shed”), and other poetic devices that suggest a sense of order and acceptance, one summarized in the poem’s poignant final lines:

I have married my life
to lowliness, and I want
to cry aloud with happiness.

Kuan deploys cultural icons as varied as Anna May Wong and Freddie Mercury as she contemplates subjects ranging from female invisibility to racial stereotyping, and  throughout, her singular lens highlights the inequities of American life. In “The Night After You Lose Your Job,” for instance, Kuan’s characterization of a newly unemployed mother embodies an implicit call for greater recognition of society’s overlooked caregivers.

Lyrical, vulnerable and astute, Women on the Moon is a wide-ranging contemporary ode to womanhood. Shedding light on romance and realism while celebrating the contributions of marginalized women, Kuan’s voice advocates for their honest representation with an acuity that speaks volumes.

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Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle and One Impossible Step

Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle
Historias y poemas de una lucha de clases
Roque Dalton
Translated by Jack Hirschman and Barbara Paschke
Seven Stories Press ($18.95)

One Impossible Step: Selected Poems
Orides Fontela
Translated by Chris Daniels
Nightboat Books ($17.95)

by Patrick James Dunagan

At first glance, not much connects the work of poets Roque Dalton (1935–1975) from El Salvador and Orides Fontela (1940–1998) from Brazil. Dalton, a committed revolutionary in the armed struggle leading up to his country’s civil war, writes poems in the direct, colloquial expression of everyday people—they are not didactic, yet they do wear their political and social concerns on their sleeves. Fontela’s poems, on the other hand, are far more hermetic; elusive, abstract, and philosophical. And of course, Fontela writes in Portuguese, Dalton in Spanish. Yet the two are contemporaries whose work responds to social conditions during turbulent times. 

Looking at these two disparate poets together—that is, reading them through each other’s lenses—enhances the parameters with which the work of each might be framed. Dalton becomes more philosophical, while Fontela gains in political gravity. Take a short poem by each. Here is one of Fontela’s “Seven Bird Poems”:

We’ll never know
such purity:
bird devouring us
while we sing it.

And this is Dalton’s “Poetic Art 1974”:

Poetry
Forgive me for having helped you understand
you’re not made of words alone.

In each case, the poet addresses their art, Dalton directly and Fontela through the archetypal image of a bird. While Fontela uses the universal “we”—as translator Chris Daniels notes, “Fontela almost never wrote the word ‘eu,’ the subjective form of the Portuguese first-person singular pronoun”—Dalton maintains an intimate “I-Thou” relationship, asking forgiveness for expanding poetry’s knowledge of itself. In both cases, the power of poetry to reach beyond language’s supposed meaning is stressed, albeit from opposing perspectives. Dalton implies the revolutionary context of his poem by including the year in the title, suggesting that poetry has a role to play in a time of cultural unrest and armed struggle, but Fontela also rejects the supposed rarification of poetry—“such purity”—in favor of the more active, even violent, “devouring us” that is within the art form’s transformative power. And while different in tone, both poems extol how poetry can elevate our ability to conceive the world anew.     

Drawing from all of Fontela’s collections of poetry, One Impossible Step represents not only the broadest translation of her corpus into English, but, at only 130 pages, it also operates as a compact overview of her biography and poetics. Daniels (who has also translated Pessoa among other Lusophone authors) ingeniously includes some twenty pages of excerpts from three interviews with Fontela, and Brazilian poet Ricardo Domeneck contributes a succinct afterword that assesses the trajectory of her life and work. Domeneck describes Fontela as

A person who owned no property, who felt neither the need nor the desire for a love relationship, perhaps [she] was uninterested in praising anything but oxygen. Perhaps her poverty led her to abandon adornment and poetic beautification. . . . demonstrat[ing] the linguistic attention of a post-war poet living a historical moment that demanded, in the use of symbols, an awareness of their being signs.

Dalton is much better known to U.S. readers; an earlier edition of this very book, published in the early 1980s under the title Poemas Clandestinos/Clandestine Poems, went through multiple printings. Now released as Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle as the first of a several Dalton translations to be issued over the coming years, it is actually the last, likely unfinished, work of Dalton’s; it comprises five sets of poems by distinct “authors” invented by the poet (though these pseudo-pseudonymous characters are nothing on the scale of Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms). It’s unclear quite what Dalton had in mind by casting his voice into different personas, yet perhaps it is more important to draw attention to what these figures have in common: a belief in the necessity of cultural revolution and the use of poetry as a means towards that end. An opening “Declaration of Principles” signed by “the authors” closes by stating that the “enemy poet” (as opposed to the “servant poet” or “clown poet”) must have “a lucid and invincible confidence in the working class” and engage in “direct participation in its struggle.”

Fontela came from the working class, went to school to study philosophy on a scholarship, scraped by as a teacher, then “died in a public hospital in 1998, without a close family, destitute as a poet.” Dalton’s father was an American who financially provided for his education; he traveled internationally, spent time in Cuba honing his belief in communism and guerilla skills, and was tragically murdered in 1975 at the hands of his fellow revolutionaries in El Salvador , a victim of political infighting. Despite the vast differences in their lives, however, both poets created a body of literature hinged upon life—and because of this, these new translations of their work into English are vital.

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American Gothic: Gordon Parks and Ella Watson

Edited by Philip Brookman and Casey Riley
Steidl/The Gordon Parks Foundation/Minneapolis Institute of Art ($65)

by Chris Barsanti

Like many great collaborations, the iconic partnership of Gordon Parks and Ella Watson was an accident. In 1942, only a couple of years after the Kansas-born and Minnesota-seasoned Parks had left the Twin Cities, he started a photography fellowship with the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in Washington, D.C. In his autobiography A Choice of Weapons, Parks described talking to FSA head Roy Stryker about the challenges of “using my camera effectively against intolerance.” Stryker, whose agency was tasked with fighting poverty and had already hired the likes of Walter Evans and Dorothea Lange to visualize the devastation wrought by the Great Depression, had some advice for Parks: Pointing to a Black “charwoman” mopping the hallway, Stryker said, “See what she has to say about life and things. You might find her interesting.” Parks spent four months with Watson at her work and home. The result is one of the most visually striking and quietly charged photo series of the twentieth century.

American Gothic: Gordon Parks and Ella Watson, the catalog to an exhibition of the same name at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, lays out what Parks found. In the museum show, the roughly sixty images are presented in four different categories (“Care,” “Community,” “Faith,” and “Labor”); these distinctions aren’t used in the catalog but regardless, the portraits comprise a very specific slice of life. Watson, a teenage mother whose husband was killed just before the birth of their second child, was raising two grandchildren on her own when she met Parks. A slim, upright woman with a narrow face and watchful eyes, Watson has a stoic quality in these images that suggests timelessness and stubborn dignity.

Parks’s best work is marked by his empathy. No matter how many portraits he made or awards he received, the artist who once earned his keep by playing piano in a Minneapolis brothel maintained a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God connection to his subjects. That bond is clear in American Gothic, which is less a high-flying artist’s hierarchical view of a laborer than it is a wordless conversation between two Black government workers in an environment where each had to continually prove their worth.

Parks might have been expected to bring to this series the lightning-in-a-bottle quality that characterizes his best street photography—but with Watson, he takes his time. She is carefully framed in every shot, often lit as well as the women in his fashion work. The compositions are not dashed-off but complex and layered, especially in those pictures which document the church that Watson, who was very religious, attended.

Not surprisingly, the keynote image is the iconic and initially controversial photograph that gives the exhibition and catalog their title. Multiple images show Watson sweeping the FSA hallways and offices, a poised figure in a white dress with her head down—whether from shyness, focus on her work, or both—getting on with things in a darkened institution where she was likely rarely noticed. In “Ella Watson Sweeping,” Parks seems to have placed a lamp on the floor behind a desk, creating a pool of upward-casting light that throws dramatic shadows. Watson looks heroic and unbowed yet human to a fault, without the distancing of attempted iconography.  

“American Gothic” itself remains a wonder. In what could be considered our nation’s Mona Lisa, Watson looks just off to the side of the camera with a steady, just shy of exhausted look. There is an upside-down broom in one hand, a mop visible to the right, and behind her an American flag, casting its complicated aura of high ideals and promises unkept over everything. Taken just twelve years after Grant Wood’s instantly famous Flemish-inspired painting of two similarly stoic Midwestern farmers, Parks’s photograph is similarly open-ended—it grabs the eye but doesn’t insist; you are compelled to look but are not sure what you see. Despite this ambiguity, Parks’s juxtaposition of Watson in front of the flag, with its unspoken critique of a government fighting authoritarianism abroad and maintaining inequality at home, was something of a bombshell: “You’ve got the right idea, but you’re going to get us all fired!” Stryker supposedly told Parks.

Interestingly, there is little in the exhibition that specifically addresses the class and racial disparities Parks found in Washington, D.C. (though one picture of two Black children playing with a white doll seems to prefigure his infamous “Doll Test” photo taken five years later). Although he grew up attending segregated schools, Parks was still shocked by just how institutionalized Jim Crow bigotry was in our nation’s capital, where he could not shop for clothes or get lunch where he chose because he was Black. Did he and Watson talk about this? Did they have to?

Tellingly, the book’s spine and cover credit the work to “Gordon Parks and Ella Watson.” He had the camera and the eye that produced these photographs. But her life, and everything that constituted it, was her own.

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The Garden Against Time

In Search of a Common Paradise

Olivia Laing
W. W. Norton & Company ($27.99)

by Sarah Moorhouse

Writing and gardening have often been linked. We might think of the word “anthology,” which literally means—like the Latin word florilegium—a gathering of flowers. Both terms refer to collections of excerpts or extracts, an activity that was popular among readers during the Renaissance. Olivia Laing’s new book, The Garden Against Time, brings this historic practice to mind; a memoir-cum-history of gardening, it presents curating a space for plants as a creative process, one just as involved with the imagination as writing can be.

Examining numerous thinkers enthralled by gardens and gardening and forming a collection of ideas like an array of plants, Laing’s book is, as she declares, “a garden opened and spilling over.” Gardens, for her, are a site of radical possibility; her Instagram bio labels her as a “writer/gardener,” and this dual identity, which saw Laing drop out of an English Literature degree in her early twenties to train as an herbalist, is tied up with her environmentalism and fierce social conscience. As a child, Laing attended a convent school with a garden that provided her with a “sense of absolute, unquestioning belonging,” and through each subsequent garden she has tended, she has been attempting to recover and cultivate this feeling.

The Garden Against Time begins in 2020 when, after “a surge of good fortune,” Laing purchased and began to restore a walled garden in Suffolk. By laying down roots in its soil and watching green shoots spring up, she found hope amidst constant anxiety about the coronavirus pandemic and wider environmental disaster. While she claims that she “never saw the garden as a place to escape reality,” Laing rejoiced in how “the outside world receded” as she replaced doom-scrolling on her phone with weeding and sowing.

In some ways the book is an extended meditation on how this has always been the paradox of gardens; Laing argues that green spaces reflect the times they were created in, from the Garden of Eden and the grounds owned by eighteenth-century slave traders to the imaginative oasis that artist Derek Jarman cultivated while dying from AIDS in the late 1980s. That she attends to these sometimes troubled histories should be no surprise, for each of her previous books has expressed a thrumming dissatisfaction with the political status quo: for example, Laing’s 2018 novel Crudo is set against the backdrop of Brexit and Donald Trump’s election campaign, while her 2020 essay collection Funny Weather considers ways art can address social injustice. In this new volume, Laing describes how gardening became a “solace” and even a “compulsion” at a time when it felt that “everything I wanted to say sounded exactly like the sort of thing a person like me would say, a stupid liberal.”

Laing does occasionally veer close to sounding trite when waxing lyrical about gardens. When she declares that “the garden I chose had walls, but like every garden it was interconnected, wide open to the world,” the reader might struggle to take this at face value; Laing has experimented with rejecting private property (she spent part of her twenties living in a protest camp), but it’s hard to read the same degree of radical nonconformism into her embrace of gardening—one of the most conventional middle-class pursuits. Moreover, her garden is no cabbage-patch; in 2022, the British magazine House and Garden ran a feature on “Olivia Laing’s dream Suffolk home,” showcasing Laing’s resplendent property. When read alongside that article, Laing’s gushing descriptions of blooming hyacinths and hooded lilacs can’t help but seem a bit bourgeois.

Mostly, however, The Garden Against Time does not shy away from gardening’s association with class. Most notable is the tale of Iris Origo, an elegant landowner who used the gardens of her Tuscan villa to shelter refugees during World War II. Origo’s estate was transformed from a place that represented exclusivity to a site of protection and communal belonging, though eventually, both house and garden were requisitioned by the Germans. Upon the Allied victory, Origo’s garden was left “full of shell holes and trenches” and “covered in a foul litter of broken objects,” yet Origo noted after returning home that “there is still jasmine on the wall”; its classism shattered, the garden had become a site of both destruction and hope.

Laing’s own garden also offers her the context to explore a running drama between opposing forces. Engaged in a continuous battle against weeds, Laing is initially attached to the idea that her garden paradise cannot contain any destructive elements, declaring, “Eden was my intention.” Midway through the project, however, she changes tack: If she is to upend the paradigm whereby gardens denote exclusivity and escapism, then she cannot shut out pernicious elements, be they weeds, world events, or—increasingly—the impact of climate change, which manifests as droughts and extreme heat.

This brings Laing to the most important idea in the book: that in attempting to make things better, “we need to start from our contaminated present and not some future position of undiluted purity.” We can’t wait for fossil fuels to become obsolete before we address climate change in earnest, nor can we give up on being kind to one another during times of entrenched political divisions. Laing arrives at a criticism of Eden, blaming this archetypal garden for propagating an ideal of purity that is incompatible with sustainability, and explaining that “the fantasy of perpetual abundance” is Eden’s “more sinister legacy”:

So many of our most ecologically deleterious behaviours are to do with refusing impermanence and decay, insisting on summer all the time. . . . To accept the presence of death in the garden is . . . to refuse an illusion of perpetual productivity . . . an illusion purchased at a heavy, soon unpayable cost.

Laing arrived at this realization during a drought in the summer of 2022, when it became clear that to water her plants, she would need to “disregard the consequences, the rivers that were drying up by the day.” Her garden, she saw, exists within the “contaminated present” and like everything we use, its materials have a hidden cost. By accepting “death in the garden,” however, Laing begins to formulate an alternative approach founded on a cyclical notion of time, whereby death is not the end point but is instead involved in various processes of renewal. Intriguingly, this echoes the case she makes for art as a mode of “resistance and repair” in Funny Weather.

But what might a garden founded on “resistance and repair” look like? Laing offers a clue in her descriptions of London after World War II, when wildflowers and plants sprang up from the city’s rubble. A public garden emerged that was beautiful for its incongruity as well as for the sense of shared possibility it represented, with the ruined city “mantled in gold and imperial purple, the ripe smell of buddleia mixing with the sourness of brick dust and mould on the air.” Laing sees this as a metaphor for other types of flourishing in post-war Britain, suggesting that through “housing, education, the welfare state . . . there was a brief vision of the nation as a collective garden, in which everyone could partake of the fruit.”

This is lofty stuff, but Laing’s enthusiasm for her subject is infectious, and she is convincing in her assertion that exposure to nature’s beauty is a right, not an indulgence. “Each garden run along these wilder, richer lines,” she urges us to recognize, “participates in a great network . . . sustaining and supporting life.” Laing gives these words weight by showing what happens when our contact with nature is taken away, suggesting that the Romantic poet John Clare’s descent into madness was exacerbated by his removal from the green spaces he so loved. During his confinement at Northampton General Lunatic Asylum between 1841 and his death in 1864, Clare would write on scraps of paper such messages as “where flowers are, God is, and I am free.” Laing, too, believes that freedom can be found in a garden.

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Brotherless Night

V. V. Ganeshananthan
Random House ($18)

by Ann Klefstad

V. V. Ganeshananthan’s 2023 novel Brotherless Night, a product of long and careful research and an amazing feat of empathic imagination at once, is now out in paperback, and has won both the Carol Shields Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction on its journey. The book is narrated by Sashikala Kulenthiren, a young girl living in the Tamil community of Jaffna in northern Sri Lanka. Sashi is driven to become a doctor like her grandfather, and is a serious and formidable student, pushing through initial failure and continuing despite the gradual crumbling of her community under the stresses of conflict. The successive losses of her four brothers, however, form the frame of the story.

In response to violent repression of Tamils (who are Hindu) by the Sri Lankan government (who represent the majority Sinhalese Buddhists), a number of Tamil militant groups form, including the Tamil Tigers. The past cruelties of the Sinhalese government gradually come to light through the screen of a happy family’s life; these events arise in the narrative like the smoke of distant fires, until the flames come to engulf the story entirely.

K, a neighbor boy, becomes Sashi’s most resonant attachment, neither a lover nor merely a friend. His anonymity throughout the book—he is always only K—feels like a reinforcement of the distance that ideology creates, as he becomes central to the Tigers’ struggle and recruits a reluctant Sashi to work at a field hospital. In a sign of foreboding, her first patient is one of her brothers; gradually all circumstances of life in Jaffna are enmeshed in the struggle, and violence and death are the price of refusal to participate.

Sashi is never a true believer but rather a faithful observer, clear-eyed and dispassionate in her account, even though heartrending losses mount. The Tigers are young men she knows; they are also killers of her teacher, of loved ones. Yet the government officials who have created the climate of violence are also people known to her, while Sinhalese neighbors help Sashi and her mother escape death at the hands of government soldiers. Nothing is black and white except the tragedies of violence.

Anjali Premachandran, Sashi’s teacher at her medical school, becomes a key figure in the novel; a researcher and reporter of events, she is drawn from an actual person, also a professor of anatomy at the medical school in Jaffna. Rajani Thiranagama was one of the authors of The Broken Palmyra, an account of the Sri Lankan civil war written by four Tamil professors comprising the University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna). They took on the mission of documenting human rights violations during the war no matter who committed them, developing research techniques that prioritized fact over passion. Ganeshananthan remarked in a January 2023 essay in LitHub, “Through reading their work, I came to believe that meaningful representation required self-critique. They wrote especially movingly and analytically about how the Tigers, a fascist movement, had arisen from Tamil society.”

Thiranagama was killed because of her truth-telling, but despite its roots in a harrowing and complicated real-world struggle, Brotherless Night does not over-explain but instead lets events simply unfold. Ganeshananthan’s prose, in fact, continually suggests the refusal of real life to conform itself to a Procrustean bed of ideologies. A scene in which a woman who had been raped by soldiers detonates a suicide bomb in a government office offers a brutal example: “The first small, potent blast caught her and the man together, and with her right arm gone and his left leg severed beneath the knee, they looked like one person, dancing. Her hair fell out of its pins into his open mouth.”

Having lived with the history of her country’s nearly three-decade civil war, Ganeshananthan has first experienced and then created a realm in which facile judgments are impossible. Brotherless Night is a testament to the relentless need for understanding tragedy through story.

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Arguing for a Better World

How Philosophy Can Help Us Fight for Social Justice

Arianne Shahvisi
Penguin Books ($20)

by Josh Steinbauer

Arianne Shahvisi is a Kurdish British professor of philosophy, and many of the essays in her new book Arguing For a Better World began as reflections on questions from her students. With extraordinary curiosity and conversational ease, she lays out her arguments in response. Shahvisi is not aiming to be objective or apolitical here: “I have tried to make my reasoning clear enough that those who disagree with me will at least see where we part ways.”

Early chapters like “Can You Be Racist to a White Person?” arrive where any progressive writer would, but with a noteworthy eloquence: “History breaks the symmetry between two otherwise comparable acts.” From there, the ethical inspections grow in complexity. In “Is It Sexist to Say ‘Men Are Trash?’” Shahvisi’s response is “When someone says ‘men are trash’ they connect sexual harassment to masculinity. That’s not an act of hate, it’s an act of illumination.” She takes the torch to the very concept of masculinity when she writes, “Toxic masculinity also implies the existence of a ‘healthy’ masculinity, when such a thing seems unlikely or even contradictory. Gender is itself a system of division and hierarchy. Finding ways to make it more palatable misses the deeper moral issues.”

Shahvisi layers a lot of historical research into her arguments. In a chapter about cancel culture, she makes a pit stop in the ancient city state of Athens, where every winter, residents could write the name of someone who’d caused offense onto a broken piece of clay pot. These shards were tallied, and the most disliked person was exiled for ten years. History shows us that even early forms of canceling were not about censorship, but rather “a powerful tool for discouraging assholery.”

The intersection of the personal and political is Shahvisi’s wheelhouse, and she engages it from an array of unlikely angles. In a chapter about individual responsibility within unjust systems, Shahvisi starts with a passage from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath about banks being monsters that men made but can’t control. She funnels that into a story about backyard bickering with her father over disposable plastic, and then pivots to U.K. medical devices produced using child labor in Pakistan. It’s all over the map (as issues related to globalization tend to be), but, like any skillful storyteller, Shahvisi is setting the stage.

When it comes to discussing environmental responsibility, the professor serves up Kant’s Categorical Imperative on the world’s dinner plate. Currently, about half the world’s land mass is used for agriculture. If the rest of the world ate like the average person from India, agriculture would only take up 22%. For the average U.K. resident’s diet, we’d need 95%. For the rest of the world to eat like an American—273 pounds of meat per year—we would need 137% of the world’s land mass for agriculture. This impossibility is the teachable moment of Kant’s universalizability principle: Americans cannot morally consume this much more than their share of the world’s resources.

Shahvisi is critical of capitalist solutions to global woes. When the market sees our desire for eco-friendly options, it cashes in with a retail markup; this sells a clear conscience to those who can afford it while pricing out the masses, functionally sidelining any meaningful solution. She eviscerates the hemming and hawing we do now over our personal carbon footprints, tracing it back to the oil company BP paying the ad agency Ogilvy & Mather to market the idea that individuals (rather than fossil fuel companies) should determine their own climate impact. When fossil fuel websites promote consumer carbon calculators, our society is simply gamifying a Choose Your Own Carbon Dystopia. It’s an update to the playbook that the plastics industry used decades ago to promote flimsy recycling programs as a way of shifting the cost and blame for environmental consequences onto consumers.

The author is pragmatic about how far individual responsibility will take us. Avoiding plastic grocery bags and straws is not going to save the planet: “A single drinking straw is, in fact, a literal drop in the ocean compared with, say, the 705,000 tons of plastic dumped in the sea every year by the fishing industry.” Global dilemmas require international government coordination. Shahvisi holds room for individual impact, but Arguing for a Better World illustrates that our choices are constrained by economic forces and our desires are manipulated by advertising, all without any sense of consequence.

Shahvisi does suggest some novel solutions. For example, she asks, what would it look like if the same level of scrutiny we apply to cigarettes was applied to other products? In the same way that health warnings are a mandatory portion of tobacco packaging, what if we learned, for example, that this pair of shoes or that pair of jeans was produced in a sweatshop where child workers are running machines on 11-hour shifts for less than their country’s minimum wage? It’s hard to say how much justice individual consumers might achieve this way, but the success of tobacco regulation is hard to ignore.

Essays about how to be in our present-day unjust world abound, but the guidance Shahvisi offers in Arguing for a Better World is a refreshing amalgam of progressive politics and professorial pondering. She reminds us that mistakes are unavoidable, and that our moral and political arguments require as much compassion as reason. As she states, “we are all fallible and unfinished, and need to be offered conditions under which learning is possible.”

Art courtesy of the reviewer, one in a series of renditions of writers alongside their words featured on his Instagram (@joshsteinbauer).

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Walk the Darkness Down

Daniel Magariel
Bloomsbury ($27.99)

by Jonathan Fletcher

Daniel Magariel’s latest novel, Walk the Darkness Down, immerses readers into the troubled marriage of Les, a commercial fisherman, and Marlene, a frustrated homemaker. Marlene and Les have endured the worst tragedy conceivable—the death of a child—and though they remained together, their relationship (less a marriage than the inevitable conclusion of a long past romance) is as turbulent as the seas to which Les escapes in an effort to avoid the difficult conversation he and Marlene have needed to have for years.

With observations as insightful as they are sonically pleasing (“Sex has become primitive to him, violent, as grisly as a knifing”), Magariel never strays into the didactic, and the dialogue is equally crisp and effective:

I’m not moving down there. The crew needs me. I have a responsibility to them.
And what about to me?
They’re family.
Family?
Family.

Magariel also judiciously treats readers to purposeful, understated insights. At the end of the first chapter, Marlene clumsily fights Les, only to end up face down on the street in front of their apartment:

For a moment she believes he might somehow conjure Angie by uttering her name, which he’s refused to do for two years now. For a moment, turning her eyes to the top of the stairs, to all the light pouring out of their apartment, she stakes her life on the doorway not being empty.    

A story about two people whose life together has been mostly a life apart, Walk the Darkness Down relies on scenes in which such apartness is not only felt but explicit. Marlene finds an unusual hobby of sorts in befriending local sex workers from The Villas, a defunct motel that since essentially serves as a brothel, and taking them home to care for them: “She never entered the motel, never even pulled up to the lobby, and never brought home the same woman twice.” The arrangement is generally reciprocal: “On nights like these Marlene sees herself as a kind of archaeologist, exhuming the lives of others. As Marlene works, the woman she picked up an hour ago is remade into a girl.” Though Marlene’s “hobby” may not be entirely altruistic, her motives are sympathetic: In helping care for the sex workers, Marlene can feel she is symbolically saving her and Les’s late daughter Angie. Yet when Marlene is alone, this indirect salvation is not enough—it will take more than good deeds to heal. It will also take the understanding and involvement of Marlene’s detached husband—a reality not lost on Marlene as she cuddles one of the women at the end of the second chapter.

Magariel’s settings are equally important in establishing the distance between Marlene and Les. Eschewing lengthy and elaborate descriptions of the coastal town in which the couple lives and life at sea, Magariel instead treats the reader to dynamic and symbolically loaded sequences. At one point, Les looks out on the Atlantic Ocean from the trawler he’s stationed on, taking in the unfathomable scale and size of the sea and the life within it:

Out here bait balls the size of football fields appear from nowhere, the water surface suddenly sparkling with tens of thousands of glinting fish. Biblical weather arrives in full portent. On clear days, when the faint curve of the planet is the only delineation of sky and sea, thoughts warp toward the terrors of myth. Les might imagine a skyscraper tsunami lifting out of the horizon. Or in the inscrutable white of fog, the waters haunted and the hazy sun a second moon, the boat might steam into the open mouth of an awakened leviathan.

At times the environment in Walk the Darkness Down is reported or implicit within the plot. Josie, the latest sex worker taken in by Marlene, shares a news story about horseshoe crabs spawning early in the area, a moving echo of her own urgent situation:

They came up out of the ocean, laying their eggs way before they were supposed to, Josie says. But the awful thing is that the sand was too cold to bury them. So they just left them there. Bill [Josie’s pimp] calls it the tooth and claw, same with the birds, times when the human shine rubs away and the world becomes just a giant thing eating itself, one town at time, one species, one industry, one mother—she pauses—one child.

Besides obviously reflecting Marlene’s and Les’s loss, Josie’s reportage also serves as a tonal contrast to Les’s scene of contemplation on the trawler. Though foreshadowing impending danger, such a scene also suggests the possibility of hope—a possibility only achievable through cooperation and forgiveness. Magariel’s novel doesn’t shy away from sad, even tragic, truths, but also gives the reader a more positive reality to contemplate.

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Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell's Invisible Life

Anna Funder
Knopf ($32)

by C.T. Wolf

George Orwell’s contributions are many—though he did not achieve them alone. As with many men, it was the women in his life that made his success possible. Eileen O’Shaughnessy, who was married to the writer from 1936 until her death at age thirty-nine in 1945, did just that, even as it shrank her own horizons. What did it mean to be Orwell’s wife? Anna Funder’s new book unpicks this inquiry with precision, dexterity, and charm. Wifedom is not a biography, but instead an incisive investigation into “wifedom” and what it meant for Eileen, a poet with chronic illness, to inhabit the role of “Mrs. Orwell” until her dying day.

Eileen had what in her time was called uterine tumors, which caused vaginal bleeding, anemia, and crushing fatigue. Despite this, she was often the sole breadwinner for the couple, working full time outside the home so George could focus on his writing. She also was his typist, editor, and collaborator, using her poetic sensibility and humanist insight to help push George’s writing to new heights. Friends were in awe of his 1945 novel Animal Farm, both for its gemlike quality and in the departure it represented from his prior work. That was Eileen’s deft influence, as Funder lays out—one among many that have been carefully erased from the record of George’s life.

How were Eileen’s contributions made invisible, and by whom? Funder creates a hybrid narrative that craftily builds a multifactorial story. She lays out archival material, critically appraising letters and firsthand accounts of the couple by their friends and acquaintances, documents written both contemporaneously and later. At the core of the archival record are six letters written by Eileen to her best friend, Norah Symes Myles, discovered in 2005.

Funder looks closely at the ways language is used to erase women from historical records; she inspects Orwell’s own writing as well as the work of his biographers and overlays events that happened in the couple’s life with how those events are written about. For example, both Eileen and George went to Spain in the late 1930s to fight in the resistance, yet Eileen is entirely omitted from George’s account. Similarly, in Orwell’s first book Down and Out in Paris in London, his chronicle of living and working among the poor, he left out the wealthy aunt in Paris who offered him respite from his fieldwork. And pointing to the pernicious use of passive voice, Funder argues that many of Orwell’s biographers surgically erased Eileen as an active subject in George’s life.

In Wifedom, Funder brings some of the history to vivid life via speculation. She sees this not as writing fiction, however, but rather like “directing an actor on set.” Putting archival events mise en scène—the clinks of tea cups, the pangs of uterine cramps—allows the reader to become more intimately immersed in the world occupied by George and Eileen and to bear witness to the peculiar dynamic of their relationship. And in yet another writerly layer, Funder tells her own story of working through the project and what it has meant to her as a writer, wife, mother, and Orwell fan herself, wrestling with the complexities of gender, agency, and love as they relate to the craft:

As a writer, the unseen work of a great writer’s wife fascinates me, as I say – out of envy. I would like a wife like Eileen, I think, and then I realise that to think like a writer is to think like a man. It is to look from his perspective at what he needed and see how he got it. But as a woman and a wife her life terrifies me. I see in it a life-and-death struggle between maintaining her self, and the self-sacrifice and self-effacement so lauded of women in patriarchy, which are among the base mechanisms by which our work and time are stolen. What did she give and what did it cost her? I find this question so chilling, coming out of twenty years of intense life-and-home-making, that I prefer to think it does not apply to me.

Grappling with this personal tension, Funder’s reflexivity helps breathe contemporary life and immediacy into the book.

One aspect missing from Wifedom is attention to Eileen’s experience of disability. In one of her last letters to George, Eileen debated the cost of her upcoming surgery, confessing to him: “what worries me . . . is that I really don’t think I’m worth the money.” Perhaps she was just wanting comfort and reassurance from George (who was off in Europe leaving Eileen to handle, among other things, the adoption of their son). Or perhaps her feelings of guilt and shame for needing an expensive operation were a manifestation of internalized sexism and ableism. Regardless, Eileen’s health concerns were treated as hers and hers alone, while George’s tuberculosis was a family affair: Eileen enlisted her brother (a renowned thoracic surgeon) to ensure George received first-rate care, and the couple carted off to Morocco so George’s lungs could enjoy a dry winter; later, Eileen endured grueling, long train trips (after working all day) to visit him in a sanitarium, while she too was suffering from a disabling medical condition. Looking at Eileen’s life with an intersectional lens—how both sexism and disability worked to close in the horizons of her life —could have strengthened this already stellar book.

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Praiseworthy

Alexis Wright
New Directions ($22.95)

by Simon Webster

In the opening pages of Praiseworthy, the latest novel by Australian author Alexis Wright, we meet Cause Man Steel, a raving dreamer performing his anxieties for the “clergy-oriented” people of the titular town. Cause—variously referred to as Widespread, for the breadth of his ideas, and Planet, for their cosmic nature—is a step ahead of the game. These are “cataclysmic times,” he preaches, but Praiseworthy people are survivors with “a sovereign world view.” The choir has heard this one before, but Cause is offering more than survival; he promises the townspeople they will “ride straight through the century on the back of the burning planet” and live to tell the tale.

The catastrophe that sets Cause in motion is a haze “full of broken ancestors breathing . . . virus air.” As the haze settles over Praiseworthy, the townspeople try everything to banish it:  They punch at it, play it Dvořák and Bach, lobby for its Constitutional exclusion. They curse it. They build a giant hologram scarecrow. They appeal to God and to the white government—Hail Marys and a Hail Mary. Resigned to its permanence, they promote it as a tourist attraction.

Eventually, the haze splits, metastasizing in the lungs of Ice Pick, the town’s mayor—a “rhapsodically self-proclaimed king of orators.” Possessed by the haze, Ice becomes “obsessed by whiteness”—his skin, even his eyeballs, turn white, and he covers his body with a “labyrinth of Casper the Ghost tattoos.” Ice warns his constituents that government help (in the form of explosives to blow up the haze) will never arrive if they “do not assimilate and be white,” and—with an eye on the upcoming election—promises to build “the new Praiseworthy into an all-bustling, all-glitter . . . Aboriginal world metropolis.”

But if Ice is a man of words, Cause is a man of action. Knowing that survival has always been an economic question, he looks backwards to look forwards, and decides to bet on donkeys; when global transportation systems collapse, he’ll be there with his carbon-neutral transport conglomerate. But his fleet needs a lodestar, a “Jesus donkey . . . the colour of an Apollo spaceship,” as was revealed to him in a dream. Cause feels called to greatness, like Genghis Khan, and for a few hundred pages, we follow him on his picaresque journey: Don Quixote in search of his ass.

It’s the family, of course, that suffers. Cause’s wife, Dance, has dreams too, and no “desire for being a stand-in for [him] as the social pariah of the community.” Their eldest son, Aboriginal Sovereignty—named for the words Cause most liked saying—is a seventeen-year-old amateur boxer and dancer; Tommyhawk, their youngest at eight, believes that Aboriginal parents are heartless and that all Aboriginal men are pedophiles—and acts accordingly. When his brother falls in love with his promise wife, who is only fifteen, Tommyhawk reports him, and Aboriginal Sovereignty is arrested for raping a minor.

Epic in scope, Praiseworthy is split into ten sections. The second opens with Aboriginal Sovereignty walking into the sea—“flat out disappearing into the mighty shark-infested ocean”—and continues for over a hundred pages as Tommyhawk, hiding nearby in a whale skeleton and eating a bag of chips, impatiently wills his brother on, a harrowing inversion of the story of Cain and Abel. Suicide by drowning is common in Praiseworthy, especially among the kids: “It was like a pied piper thing, somebody’s spirit coming up from the sea at night and talking rubbish to those children.” The sea has become a tomb, and fishermen involuntary “corpse hunters.” Shouldering Ecclesiastical pain, the people of Praiseworthy know that “wave after wave of their eternal tides of grief [will] end up plonking Aboriginal Sovereignty right back in the midst of the breathing heart and soul of the traditional country.”

Alexis Wright is a member of the Waanyi nation of the southern highlands of the Gulf of Carpentaria; she grew up in Cloncurry, a small town in northwestern Queensland about a thousand miles from the capital. She published her first novel in 1997 and in the quarter-century since has written furiously about violence, cruelty, injustice, and hopelessness in a humane, generous, and hopeful manner. As in her other works, church and state loom large in Praiseworthy, and are cast against the permanence of country. There are “sixty thousand lightning bolts in every dry storm,” an allusion to the “sixty thousand year plus cultural history of Aboriginal survival.” At a slight breeze, the churches of Praiseworthy topple “like a line of dominoes.”

In all of Wright’s books, language does power’s bidding. Praiseworthy people use “God words for renovating their Dreamtime cathedrals” and know “being literate in government affirmative action jargon talk” is essential. The colonial “gaol” is retained, and signs outlining the prohibition of liquor, pornography, and pedophiles in Praiseworthy are written in English—a language ignored by the old fishing people. Yet in the face of country, language recedes:

The old men and women eternally searching for the return of Aboriginal Sovereignty were bequeathed to nothingness, other than to a consciousness of interconnectedness where relatives were all life, and further related to ancestral creators, and further related back into deep time, and across all country places of land, sea, and skies.

The impassiveness of country is total. The seagulls “never once landed on any of these signs . . . nor had a single lizard, ant, or any other animal like a snake bothered twisting itself around a government signpost.” A few pages later, thunder roars, and forks of lightening “hit every single one of the signs . . . like a circle of firecrackers lit up on a cake.”

Still, language is persistent, and in Ice Pick, word becomes flesh. “See this piece of paper? That’s me . . . You are looking at the bodily incarnate of this piece of paper. I am the Commonwealth Government of Australia’s forward plan for Praiseworthy.” For Ice, assimilation is the key, and he implores his constituents to leave grief behind and embrace figures, multiplication, economics; follow him into the future and he will “make the ark pure again.” Aboriginal Sovereignty is the ultimate target:

He was being personified by the imagination of the nation-state, the dull dirty lens of Australian folk law. Yep! He was the ethnological story. He fed the hunger. Fattened the mudslinger’s narrative of racial vilification. He was the paedophile savage. You know what happens when you throw enough mud? Hallelujah! . . . The national narrative strengthened at the total cost of billions of dollars to hold back the tide of black justice through a simple illusion of fear, the dreaded uprising of the soul, the spirit of black savages attacking Australian domesticity. Nothingness achieved again, and again. Where was the light? Where was the flame to see the way?

Praiseworthy, a big novel in every sense, ranges from deep in the sea to the “dusty rivers of stars in the Milky Way” as well as across time and “through all the known spatial realities.” There are references to Borges and Calvino, Kafka and Krasznahorkai, as well as to a Waanyi language dictionary, Livy’s History of Rome, the operas of Belshazzar and Offenbach, Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, Donne and Shakespeare, Greek, Chinese, and Japanese mythologies, pop culture high and low, various oral traditions, and the Bible, again and again. It’s not tidy, and that’s the point—because it contains all of country, the “atmosphere, cosmos, stars, heavens, lands, seas, flora and fauna,” this latest outing from an exemplary Australian writer refutes domesticity and affirms sovereignty unapologetically. 

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The Private Life of Lord Byron

Antony Peattie
Unbound ($45)

by Allan Vorda

Previous biographies of Lord Byron, including Leslie Marchand’s three-volume set in 1957, have seemingly covered and dissected every inch of the English poet’s fascinating and mythical life, which ended when he was only thirty-six. In the introduction to The Private Life of Lord Byron, Antony Peattie tells us to expect something completely different.

Recent studies of Byron have focused on his bisexuality, but Peattie investigates “two other areas (which may be related to one another): his intermittent eating disorder and his obsession with fatherhood.” Peattie’s unique approach draws on less-studied biographical facts—for example, that Byron suffered from bulimia nervosa and anorexia nervosa: “Considering his diet, what he ate, what he didn’t eat, when and why, yields insights into Byron’s love life and his intentions in his masterpiece, Don Juan.” Peattie tracks some of the reasons why Byron dieted, including battles with his obese mother, a misshapen foot that required him to walk with a metal plate in his boot, a prescription from a physician for a daily diet of six biscuits and soda water, and his relentless romantic and sexual pursuits. 

Byron’s issues with his father were complicated. He rarely saw Captain “Mad Jack” Byron, who was often at sea; when on land, he was a womanizer and gambler. He left his wife and three-year-old Byron for France to escape creditors before dying at thirty-five. From a young age, Byron began to follow in his father’s footsteps; the same habits landed him similarly in debt. He felt he inherited his father’s traits and that he was “predestined to evil.” Part of this thinking was drilled into him by his mother, whose Scottish Calvinism endorsed “predestination, man’s innate depravity and his hereditary taint.” Byron also learned that his particular heritage included “a long tradition of dissipation, incest, rampant promiscuity, decadence, murder and unbridled debauchery.”

Some of those family prophecies came true; Peattie traces Byron’s wide range of trysts that gained him a kind of infamy. Byron’s first sexual experience was being seduced at age nine by his nanny; at Trinity College a decade later, he became involved with a younger student, John Edleston: “I certainly love him more than any human being, & neither time or Distance have had the least effect on my (in general) changeable Disposition.”

Edleston died at age twenty-two from consumption, and Byron’s sexual conquests quickly escalated. After graduating from Trinity, he did a Grand Tour of Europe, during which he had numerous affairs. Upon his return, he published two cantos of poetry, titled Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which sold out in three days. He was only twenty-four.

Once Byron achieved fame, his affairs were countless. There was Lady Caroline, who stated, famously, that Byron was “mad—bad—and dangerous to know”; his niece Mary Chaworth; his half-sister Augusta Leigh; Annabella Milbanke, whom he married and who bore his only legitimate child; Claire Clairmont, stepsister of Mary Shelley, who bore his daughter; the Italian women Marianna Segati and Margarita Cogni; the nineteen-year-old Countess Teresa Guiccioli; the Maids of Athens (three sisters who were under the age of fifteen); fourteen-year-old Nicolo Giraud, whom Byron hired as an Italian tutor; and many others—and those are just the ones whose names we know. By the time Byron turned thirty, Peattie writes, the poet was “determined to make the most of his time for sex and for writing—the two activities were now closely linked in his mind.” Don Giovanni claimed 640 conquests; Byron is estimated to have had around one thousand sexual encounters.

Byron composed his epic poem Don Juan in Italy from 1819-24. Consisting of seventeen cantos and 1,950 stanzas, the mock epic poem shows Don Juan not as a womanizer, but as a sexual victim. When it was published, it was considered the greatest poem since Milton’s Paradise Lost.

In the final chapter in his life, Byron, wanting to achieve some glory like his hero Napoleon, decided to try to help the Greeks wrest their freedom from the Ottoman Empire. He went to Missolonghi to train some Christian Albanian troops and was ready to go into battle when he became ill. His doctor performed a blood-letting that he claimed “cured Byron’s ‘attack of epilepsy’ by drawing off ‘four pounds of blood’, half the total in his body.” During this time, Byron adhered to his strict diet, which compounded his illness, then decided to train his five hundred soldiers on horseback when he “was ‘caught in a shower.’” Byron came down with a cold and the doctor performed a second blood-letting, but after becoming delirious, Byron died on April 19, 1824 at age thirty-six.

Two congratulations must be given for The Private Life of Lord Byron. The first is to author Antony Peattie for offering such a unique insight into Byron’s life regarding his eating disorder—not to mention delving into numerous other aspects of the poet’s life from Satanism to Shelley, and discussing numerous poems and plays with aplomb. The other goes to British publisher Unbound for making the book such an extravagant and elegant production: Its 586 pages include amazing photographs, paintings, and sketches rendered in extraordinary color, and there is even an old-style ribbon bookmark sewn in. Everything is exquisite about this book.

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