Here are some of my thoughts on 4 books I’ve read of late. Thank you for newslettering with me, what else would you like me to recommend?
The Anthropologists - Ayşegül Savaş
I picked this up (as in downloaded it in epub format) because my friend Samia had said it’s one of her favourites, and we have similar tastes, in particular especially our convergence on Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr!, and also because of the fact that Samia is just generally a genius. Preorder her book.
Though The Anthropologists somehow didn’t hit for me! I think a lot of the reasons for this have to do with my own feelings around shame and desire, not of an interpersonal kind, but in terms of what one can seek to desire from life, what kinds of desires feel right and what kinds of letting go feels disturbing. To me, the characters’ lives felt hollow, scary in their emptiness, the evident (to me) feeling of anxiety and shame in them so palpable that it made me uncomfortable. It is uncomfortable now too, to write about it.
I read it back in February and have been thinking about it since. I think perhaps my biggest personal anxiety is the possibility of losing myself in a partner — obviously this comes as a result of seventeen types of conditioning from a million different directions, all wrestling with each other. But in the middle of it all there is the core feeling of dissolution, the thing I picture every time I imagine that possibility. Perhaps what I felt was just a personal distaste at the book’s depiction of this thing — paranoia come to life. Perhaps it was something bigger, some kind of inner resistance to the mere existence of such a thing, even in fiction. The characters’ lack of interest in resisting the things I find so terrible read like a painful, forceful, slow kind of torture. My heart is beating fast right now, again.
Emily Alexander’s review of the book helped me feel it in a new light, different from my own body, my own mind, from a new direction. “At its center is Asya’s apprehensive, consistent—though not immediately pressing—desire to establish a sense of solidity, or “sturdiness” in her life.” she writes — a desire I relate to so deeply it makes me afraid, but one I’m hardly ever brave enough to admit. And this, perhaps, is what jostled me unwelcomely in the book: the mirror it held up, the glaring falseness in my own unwillingness to say it out loud.
Gossip Girl Fanfic Novella - Charlie Markbreiter
The Companion Species Manifesto - Donna Haraway
I am not exaggerating when I say I think Charlie Markbreiter is a genius. The thing I loved so much about this book was the brazen, joyous, mischievous playfulness it held — Lauren Berlant is alive and talking to the narrator (the author?) specifically, Nate Archibald is a trans guy, Chuck Bass has a glass house sex dungeon somewhere in his hotel. Forgive me if I'm misremembering any of this.
When I bought Donna Haraway’s Companion Species Manifesto, my very initial reaction was delight at the fact that someone had taken the (seemingly unserious) subject of dogs’ relationship to humans and placed it under serious, meaningful, critical scrutiny. What I realised about my appreciation of this was that it wasn’t just to do with the idea of a trivial subject being thought of seriously, but the delight, the sheer joy, at the act of thinking itself being taken so seriously that it could be done about anything, in any direction, and still hold, in fact, must hold.
This same sentiment felt very visceral with regard to GGFN, which was both playful and careful, chaotic and sharp. It felt like a revelation, and I stopped worrying about things like form, reliability, narrative, structure, with every section just hitting me over the head with parcels of realisation, insight, meaning, confusion. Without being trite, I learned so much from this — about what fiction can do, what ideas are possible, what one can make happen if one is freaky and gross! An aspirational, deeply enjoyable text. Read this also.
Females - Andrea Long Chu
Having been a fan of Andrea Long Chu’s literary criticism for years now, Females has been on my list for about as long as I’ve known it exists. I was grateful to unintentionally buy a copy with the new afterword, because I think Chu’s engagement with her own thinking is some of the most interesting stuff in it — I was deeply curious and deeply excited to see what she still stood by from the original text, what she felt differently about, what she thought about it all, and above all, how she thought.
Perhaps similar to Markbreiter’s relationship to Lauren Berlant, Chu’s loud and uncomplicated (in that she appeared to preemptively reject any smug scrutiny) celebration of Valerie Solanas felt so exciting to me. Her centrality to the book — not just her art, but her life — felt like a thing Chu actively drew on, and I could almost physically picture her consciously directing and redirecting her ideas in Solanas’ direction. It felt like a friendship, a kind of unapologetic (sorry) veneration (sorry) of someone “problematic” (sorry!!!!) that has been flattened into obscurity by leftist discourse. Chu’s complete lack of fucks about this was delicious.
The idea of femaleness, then, as Chu articulates it, felt remarkably prescient — and her justification for calling this (that everyone already does!) felt genuinely irrefutable. The thing we call female is the thing we all hate. The thing we call gender is our means of managing this. It’s as good an understanding of this as any, and in fact, is markedly more resonant than the meanings people attempt to construct onto the corpus of fear and misgivings called the patriarchy. The fearlessness it takes to simply say fuck it, I am calling it — it feels somehow similar to the fearlessness of shooting Andy Warhol. Flippant, but sharply-aimed, unforgiving.
I also read Full Surrogacy Now by Sophie Lewis (which I wrote a bit about here) and am currently reading Health Communism by Artie Vierkant and Beatrice Adler-Bolton and (still) The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis. They’re all tangling themselves up in my head together and forming clots, congealed spaces of recognisable substance. Thank god, etc. See you next time.
i liked aysegul savas' book, but weirdly, most of what i remember months after reading it is how she described the architecture of the homes they looked at