A reader has no favourite book

Gillian Flynn – “Gone Girl”

Posted on 29 Nov 202230 Nov 2022 by Gabriela

Just so you’re not surprised by the conclusion of this review, I’ll say it now: I hated this book. I am not sure how I could put into words how much I disliked this book, but I’ll try my best because I really don’t want anyone to ever feel like it is something worth reading. Maybe watch the film if you really want to know what’s going on? I haven’t because I don’t want to be double annoyed, but I’m sure it’s better to be annoyed for a couple of hours than for a week straight because this is not just a horrible book, it is also a 500-page book.

This review will have all the spoilers probably, but you should keep reading nevertheless.

I found this book in one of the boxes people sometimes leave out for other people to look in and choose whatever they want (which is a common thing in the country I just moved to). I was really excited to finally have found a book in a language I am able to read and I thought it would actually be a good read since I had heard about the book and the film and I assumed they couldn’t be that bad.

Oh boy, was I wrong…

Gone Girl is the story of a wife that suddenly disappears one day and the book alternates between chapters from her perspective, Amy, and her husband’s perspective, Nick. In the first half of the book, we have her diary entries, which paint her as an amazing and devoted wife and him as an asshole and a cheater. Plot twist: she’s framing him for her murder to get revenge for his cheating and in the second half of the book we find her real perspective, as the diary entries were just some evidence she manufactured for the framing (I feel like some tests to show that the ink used in the diaries was nowhere near as old as the dates of the entry would have been good proof that he’s not making up the story of his wife framing him, but I guess that’s what you get when you write a book with zero research and all the audacity). The plot twist is not that terrible, it’s just quite predictable and by that point I was so annoyed by everything else that I wouldn’t have appreciated a good plot twist anyways.

I have so many things I dislike about this book, but I will elaborate on just two that made my reading experience pure suffering:

The writing is absolutely terrible. It’s hard for me to believe that Gillian Flynn really thinks some people’s diaries or trains of thought read like these monologues of some spoiled teenagers. I feel like she tried to achieve something like what you get in American Psycho, but she’s closer to the obnoxious voice of a Gossip Girl. Let me just give you a bit so you can understand:

Poor me. Let me set the scene: Campbell and Insley and I are all down in Soho, having dinner at Tableau. Lots of goat-ch*ese tarts, lamb me*tballs, and rocket greens, I’m not sure what all the fuss is about. But we are working backward: dinner first, then drinks in one of the little nooks Campbell has reserved, a mini-closet where you can lounge expensively in a place that’s not too different from, say, your living room. But fine, it’s fun to do the silly, trendy things sometimes. We are all overdressed in our little flashy frocks, our slasher heels and we all eat small plates of food bites that are as decorative and unsubstantial as we are.
– Amy, when we’re supposed to actually like and feel compassion for her

The misogyny! It’s absolutely everywhere. And I get it that the characters in the book are supposed to be terrible, we should despise them, but from what other reviews I read, they’re also supposed to be loved in a very twitched way because lots of people seem to actually love them. So misogyny from a bad character should be ok since they’re supposed to be evil? Maybe, if the point of including so much misogyny was to criticise it. But that never happens. Amy from her fake diary when she’s supposed to be nice and likeable is just as misogynistic as the real Amy. Lots of slut-shaming, lots of fat-shaming, and lots of unnecessary opinions about what a wife should and should not be. This book did not need all of these. There was no real need for this amount of misogyny for the plot of this book, so this excess seems just something that Gillian Flynn enjoys writing. And that made me want to puke too many times.

Even if I were to ignore the things I mentioned, this book would still be bad. For a thriller, it’s just not that thriller, the ending is just boring and at no point was I surprised during this. I was mostly annoyed and bored. And that’s simply not a good book.

Should I put this book out in a box too or should I shelter the people from my new city from reading this?

Annie Ernaux – “The Years”

Posted on 16 Nov 2022 by Gabriela

Ok, I’ll be honest: I hadn’t heard of Annie Ernaux before she won the Nobel Prize and while I am not a fan of this sort of prizes, their significance, or arbitrariness, I still consider them a good way of being introduced to new (at least to me) literature.

So I read Annie Ernaux. I knew it was going to be a good read, since for a week after the prize announcement, my feed was full of White Men Writers™ complaining, priding themselves over never having read her (not surprised boys, we know you only read each other), or talking about how forgettable her texts are. The only books that are better than books feminists love are the books misogynists hate.

I wish I had read Ernaux before because I absolutely loved it. Her writing is simple and elegant but still able to feel exquisite. The Years is a memoir of the writer but is written more like a collective memoir of French society during Ernaux’s life. There is no I in this book, only we (the French on), which offers such a unique reading experience. Constructed about a series of photographs which are described in detail, reading The Years feels like flipping through a family album and hearing the stories that are linked to each photo. It always starts with the details in the photos and keeps zooming out until the whole of France is encompassed in the description, showing the smooth connection between the micro and the macro of our world. Because of this, The Years can feel like a memoir, but also like a history book or even like a sociological analysis of French society. And Ernaux states very clearly that she cannot tell the difference between the memoir realm, which deals with the individual and one’s life, and the history realm, where the individual is just part of a mass with very few exceptions:

Family narrative and social narrative are one and the same.

Being a memoir after all, it is interesting to see how the perspective evolves from the 40s and 50s when the writer is a child and a teenager to later on when she becomes an adult. The sociological perspective is always there, but she keeps true to the emotions and feelings of the age and makes them fit into the larger context.

I loved so many things about this book, but probably my favourite part was the dialogue with the younger generation. I don’t like that it’s generally acceptable for a generational conflict to exist, especially the fact that older people are supposed to think that young people are ruining everything and that a lot of times they really do think that. But Ernaux is cool about that, she sees how the mistakes of her generation are not present or less present in the younger one and she embraces that, she is open to learning from it and she writes about this beautifully:

The young were sensible. For the essentials, they shared our way of thinking. They didn’t heckle us at the lycée, challenge the curriculum, the rules, or authority, and accepted the boredom of classes. Outside of school they came to life. They spent hours at a time on Playstations or Atari consoles, and playing role-playing games. They raved about home computers and begged us to buy the first model, Oric-1. They watched Les enfants du rock, Les Nuls, nonstop music videos on Bonsoir les clips, read Stephen King and to make us happy, leafed through the Phosphore, the lycée students’ magazine. They listened to funk and hard rock, or rockabilly. Between LPs and Walkmans, they lived inside music. They “partied hard” at teufs and probably smoked tarpés. Studied. Were close-mouthed about their futures. Opened the fridge and cupboards at all hours to eat Danette pudding cups, Bolino instant noodles, and Nutella. Slept with their girlfriends at our apartment. They didn’t have time for everything, sports, painting, film club and school trips. They didn’t resent us for anything. Journalists referred to them as the whatever generation.

Schooled together since kindergarten, girls and boys grew up quietly in what seemed to us a kind of innocence and equality. They all spoke the same crude, ill-mannered language. They called each other assholes and told each other to fuck off. We found them “very much themselves” and “natural” in relation to all that had tormented us at their age, sex, teachers, parents. We questioned them with circumspection, afraid they’d say we were a pain in the ass and got up their noses. We allowed them a freedom we’d have loved to have had ourselves, but discreetly watched over their behavior and silences, as our mothers had done with us. We looked upon their autonomy and independence with surprise and satisfaction, as something that had been won over several generations.

They had a thing or two to teach us about tolerance, anti-racism, pacifism, and ecology. They weren’t interested in politics but adopted all the generous watchwords and the slogan created just for them, Touche pas à mon pote! They bought the CD for hunger relief in Ethiopia, followed the march of the Beurs. They proved to be exacting about the “right to be different.” They had a moral worldview. We liked them.

So I am once again thanking the White Men Writers™for the great recommendations, I really hope many more will come.

Andrea Gibson – “You Better Be Lighting”

Posted on 5 Oct 2022 by Gabriela

I am writing this at midnight because someone reminded me I love to write about books and I decided to do it now because there is no better way of loving something than dedicating your present to it. And the book I am writing about is about love, or maybe less about love and more love itself.

I decided to buy You Better be Lightning after I watched Andrea’s amazing performance of Homesick: A Plea for our Planet, having never heard of Andrea Gibson before or even expecting to have my heart shaken in the most brutally beautiful way, it was mostly an impulse buy, but I’ve never regretted an impulse buy in my entire life. It’s mostly books, soft toys and all sorts of frog-shaped objects. What’s there to regret?

After just some poems and just as many crying sessions, I knew this book would be with me forever. And I mean physically, I used to carry my favourite poetry book everywhere, now it’s two of them. And it’s not just a symbolic thing I do or even just a comfort thing. No, it’s pure necessity. Sometimes I might need to remember what love is and how it can make you a bad activist or just a flawed human being. Sometimes I might need to remember what I’m fighting for by reading how queer youth are five times more likely to commit suicide or reminding myself how the earth is holding us with so much kindness and needs us to hold it back with at least a tiny fraction of that kindness. Sometimes a friend might need to sign a contract with themselves to stop being their own worst enemy and sometimes I need to remind myself I signed the same contract. Sometimes I might need to understand that I will never feel anger as long as I can feel love and that love can be so many things. Love can be in so many ways. Love can be the voice I hear when I read out loud the poem about Prince which teaches me once again that love can be so much more than we learn. So much more than romance or even friendship. Love can come from so many places I just stopped questioning love. It’s not love that needs questioning, but the lack of it. I started writing a review about the most beautiful poetry I’ve ever read and I ended up writing a long text about love. And this is perfect – because the most beautiful poetry out there will always speak about love and the most beautiful love in here will always be poetry.

And yes, this is a book about queerness and social justice and feminism and veganism and all the right things and it was great in all the right ways. But I don’t think that’s why I loved it.

Here’s a poem I loved that is short enough for me to type it:

Note to the stranger six feet away:

There was never not a bridge from your chest to mine. My heartbeat was always the sound of your feet walking towards me. I can’t believe how many years I lived without knowing the air you were breathing out was the air I was breathing in. Forgive me for not saying thank you before our lungs had reason to hide. Do you pray mor enow than you used to? I pray all the time. I pray to the Big Bang and the Tini Bang and to the bangs we’ll all have to cut ourselves so we can see what beauty can only be seen from six feet away. A giraffe’s neck is six feet long. A decade from now, will I remember the week I spent wondering if I could hug a giraffe’s torso and not get sick if the giraffe coughed? I don’t want to forget anything about this. Especially not how it feels to worry about everyone I love at the same time – so much of the world had been doing that already.

If every heart-worthy novelist weeps for days before killing off a beloved character, god must have spent centuries sobbing before pressing a pen to the page of this year.

Mia Couto – “Confession of the Lioness”

Posted on 3 Jul 2022 by Gabriela

Despite the fact that I read quite a lot of poetry books in the past month, Confession of the Lioness might be the most poetic (and the most beautiful) text I have read recently.

Once I started reading more literature written in Portuguese, I realised that the most fascinating books are not those written by Portuguese authors, but those that come from the Portuguese (ex-)colonies, in which this language is not just a means of communication, but a continuous reminder of a violent history that has not necessarily stopped. This was very obvious when I read and reviewed A General Theory of Oblivion, and it is just as obvious in Mia Couto’s book.

Mia Couto is a Mozambican writer and Confession of the Lioness is set in Mozambique. We are told that the plot is inspired from real events that happened in 2008 in Cabo Delgado, where 28 people were killed by lions, but further investigations discovered the social and historical issues underlying the events. In particular, the lions came into the village for reasons that were the humans’ fault, after intruding their habitats and making them come closer to the village for food, but the solution decided upon was to kill the lions – are humans even able to take responsibility for their mistakes and give reparations?

The book alternates between Miamar’s perspective, a woman living with her parents in Kulumani, whose sister was a victim of the lions attacks, and Archangel Bullseye’s perspective, who is a hunter called from the city to kill the lions – the officials that make this call are not interested in the welfare of the people of Kulumani, but in the political damage brought by the situation. But the people living in the village are more than mere voters, other societal mechanisms are at play.

Both Miamar and Archangel have to fight their past, present, and are wondering about their future; complex familial patterns are being explored and they have to disobey what is expected of them: Miamar is a woman that does not act like a Kulumani woman should act, Archangel Bullseye is supposed to be the only real hunter left, but is hunting what he wants to do?

One of the characters says:

I don’t know what they’re looking for in the bush, the lion is right here in the village.

It is so easy to blame someone we do not understand or want to understand. Non-human animals end up being blamed and punished so often for effects that are obviously man-made. In this book, the lion becomes a symbol (which I do not particularly like), of disobedience, of freedom. The use of the lioness is linked to Couto’s analysis of the condition of women in the village of Kulumani. Multiple women are given a voice in this book, and all of them are victims of patriarchy, which is a criminal system in general, and Couto does not shy away from denouncing these crimes.

Agustina Bazterrica – “Tender is the FLESH”

Posted on 2 Jul 2022 by Gabriela

TW: violence, slaughter, rape

In my attempt to find more fiction books that approach the topic of veganism, I came across Agustina Bazterrica’s debut novel, Tender is the Flesh, which ended up being a sort of disappointment, but has some ideas that are worth discussing – and I am going to do that because I finally found some time to actually write more than 3-line reviews on Goodreads.

Tender is the Flesh is a dystopic novel set in a future where a virus has infected non-human animals, making their meat and mere presence poisonous to humans. Therefore, all non-human animals were removed, with some still existing in the wilderness. Humans created a genetically modified type of humans that are killed in meat-processing plants and whose (special) meat is now consumed by fellow humans. These humans are modified in order not to be able to make any sounds, they are treated in all the traditional ways of factory farming and any sort of interaction, especially of sexual nature is strictly prohibited. We follow Marcos, who works in one of the processing plants, and his conflicting thoughts while he has to go about his day.

Bazterrica makes a really smart move here: there are lots of documentaries, papers, and books on the atrocities animals go through, but humans don’t seem to flinch – it’s more extreme to want the abolition of animal suffering than to partake in it. In order to make humans a bit more open to thinking about this, she replaces the victims with humans. The same mechanisms we use today to make consuming meat justified or simply not wrong are present in this world:

the humans that are being consumed need to seem as distant to the humans consuming them as possible: they are not humans, but heads i.e. objects, subhumans, and their meat is called special meat (the same way we call it pork or beef, instead of pig and cow);
they are intentionally disabled in order to be easier to handle or give better meat (the same way that chickens have been modified to have breasts so big they cannot stand or hens have been selectively bred to give eggs almost daily when naturally they would do it once a month – they need a lot of nutrients to produce these eggs, making the hens very vulnerable).

While these observations can be easily done from the setting of the book, they and their implications are not explored in any depth, so it was a bit of a let-down in the end. Bazterrica decides instead to go in-depth with a different challenging topic. Having been left by his wife after years of struggling to have a child, Marcos receives as a gift a female head, who is affectionate, even without words, and becomes part of his life, creating a bond of love. I’m trying not to spoil the rest of the book, so I will not tell you how their relationship evolves and what the ending brings. However, this bond is a good starting point for wondering about the relationship we have with the non-human animals in our lives. How do we communicate? How do we show our feelings, positive or negative? And why is this type of communication seen as below that between humans?

I know my observations and questions came up mostly because I already have these things on my mind and am aware of them, but I hope other people reading this will get to wonder, think and maybe get to similar questions.

José Eduardo Agualusa – “A General Theory of Oblivion”

Posted on 27 Mar 2022 by Gabriela

Go back to the title. Yeah, read it again. Sit with it. Let it sink.

This is maybe the most beautiful title of a book I have come across in a long time, maybe ever. So of course I had to read it. That’s how the saying goes: don’t judge a book by its cover, judge it by its title. I mean, the cover is pretty stunning too, but the title did set some really high expectations. And then it delivered.

A General Theory of Oblivion is inspired by the real story of an agoraphobic Portuguese woman that was living in Angola during the fight for the Angolan independence from the Portuguese colonisers. Once the fights start and she realises that the rest of her family isn’t coming back, Ludovica (Ludo) barricades herself in her apartment with a dog, Phantom. The book is a work of fiction, but the author had access to Ludo’s diary from that period. So we have chapters that are narrated, and diary entries (which might or might be not entries from the real journal).

In parallel, several other stories that happen in close vicinity to Ludo’s apartment unravel and they come together beautifully and very satisfyingly at the end of the book. So this is clearly a novel (or maybe a novella? it’s really short) for those that appreciate a story that is beautifully crafted and where everything falls into place. There’s no detail that feels superfluous or redundant, everything is where it’s supposed to be.

One thing that I still have mixed feelings about is the treatment of pigeons in this book. Once she runs out of food supplies, Ludo starts capturing pigeons using her jewellery and eats them and this is actually from Ludo’s real diary – this is probably a deserted island-like scenario I’ve never encountered before (and as a vegan I get a lot of those). A homeless character does the same – this is probably to illustrate the harsh conditions in that period. So I guess there is this intention of using the pigeon as a symbol of peace as usual with the twist that killing and eating them is clearly a bad sign. The thing is I’m a bit over using non-human animals to symbolise the human condition and, in this case, to move the plot forward. And we should all be over it.

A quite subtle parallel that I really enjoyed in this book is that of colonial violence vs sexual violence. As we slowly find out about Ludo’s traumatic past and her constant fear of people in general, and of the figure of her rapist in particular, we also get to understand more the contribution of colonial powers and of capitalism on the country, on the population – this is also violence. The two complement each other and we can see Ludo’s degradation and her falling into oblivion as a mirror of what happens to colonised countries and her bettering once she is saved by a kid as a hopeful prayer but also a burden on the future generation.

It’s a book worth reading and a book worth quoting (hopefully one day I’ll get to reread it in Portuguese) so I’m going to end this with my favourite quote:

‘My family is this boy, that mulemba tree out there, and a phantom dog. My eyesight gets worse every day. An ophthalmologist friend of my neighbour was here in the apartment to look at me. He said I would never lose my eyesight completely. Is till have my peripheral vision. I’ll always be able to make out the light, and the light in this country is a riot. In any case, I don’t aspire to any more: the light, Sabalu reading to me, the joy of a pomegranate every day.’

Olga Ravn – “The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century”

Posted on 2 Mar 20222 Mar 2022 by Gabriela

STATEMENT 180
Who needs to read 700 hundred pages of Red Mars when you can just read Olga Ravn’s 130 pages and get almost the same thing + extra existential anxiety?

The Employees is a series of statements from the inhabitants of the Six-Thousand Ship, some of them humans, the others humanoids – the not-so-different grown and made. All of them are here to work. We never actually get to know what it is they are working, but the corporate language and attitude towards work are enough: the content of the work is not relevant, it is work that matters. It is also work that brings humans and humanoids in close proximity. But what is it that tells them apart? The documents that clearly state whether they’re humans or not – because we know documents are the ones to be trusted, bureaucracy has never failed us. The possibility of death without regeneration, without being put in a different body. Are these enough to convey someone’s humanity? And what’s so great about humanity after all when programming can get you the work done just as well? There are some hints, it might be the human ability to innovate, to go outside the program and find something new, it might be the emotions, falling in love, what could be greater?

I like him, this human coworker of mine, his interface is impressive. I’m stronger than him, and have more endurance, but sometimes he’ll get an idea that means we can do our job in less than the designated time. He’s got an incredible knack for streamlining, from which I gladly learn. I’ve become a lot better myself at seeing how a workflow can be adjusted so that the task at hand can be completed more efficiently. This has surprised me rather a lot, because I’ve never known such improvements in my performance without an update being involved. Whenever we save time, I’m ready to move on to the next task straight away, but my coworker always says, Now let’s sit for a bit.

As the statements unfold, human and humanoid become categories that do not portray actual differences, but classes. The humans have walked the Earth, the humanoids haven’t. It’s the humans that designed and programmed the humanoids. It’s the humans that should be in charge. The humanoids are genuinely fascinated by humans, like seeing something they have yet to become. The humans are almost afraid of the humanoids, due to the possibility of the same becoming. Then there’s the reader (human or humanoid? who even knows at this point?), unable to tell apart the two categories, too entangled in their own desires and fears.

When the crew brings on the ship a series of strange objects from the planet New Discovery another layer is revealed: humans (or not only?) become almost obsessed with some of these weirdly named objects that sometimes look like earthly objects and sometimes look or smell like nothing familiar. These objects feel to the members of the crew like the most alive things on the ship – it is the objects that are alive, it is the humans and humanoids that are the objects caught under an abstract spell. Is it the unknown or just the need to feel attachment towards something?

On top of everything else, the language used is at times very poetic and makes use of all the senses, in particular the smell. For me, it’s very difficult to imagine a smell from a description made up just of adjectives so I make use of my own synesthetic associations that probably aren’t matching with Olga Ravn’s intentions. But that’s the fun. Also what if with every book came some perfume that was made to match it? I hold no copyright over this idea so please, someone, anyone, make it a thing!

The Employees seems to pose a multitude of questions and dilemmas, both philosophical (mostly metaphysical) and political. It’s the condition of workers that unites the two categories, but work is such an insidious concept, as we already know: some hate it, some define themselves through it, some are utterly indifferent towards it. Work is political. Maybe it shouldn’t be, but as I’m writing this in 2022, it definitely is. The book opens these questions, what are our answers?

I believe in the future. I think you need to imagine a future and then live in it.

Poetry Magazine

Posted on 12 Feb 2022 by Gabriela

Poetry Magazine has been a really great way for me to find poets I had never heard about and look for more of their work, but also to hear completely new voices, poets that have never published before that I can now follow and see their growth. But, as poetry usually is, it has always been more of a hit or miss – some poems made me cry, some made me angry, some mesmerised me, while others left me indifferent.

However, the January 2022 issue of the magazine is so close to being perfect I am starting to think perfection might, in fact, exist. This issue was a lot more radical than all the other ones I’ve read, it didn’t shy away from using words like communism, socialism, anti-capitalism, or from expressing solidarity with radical movements.

First of all, it has three essays I am thrilled I got to read. Two of them were on crip ecologies, based on some events that took place last year – you can actually watch the recording of the event with Kay Ulanday Barrett and Petra Kuppers here. Both essays speak about disability – being a disabled poet and artist and the way the publishing industry fails disabled writers, being a disabled adult but being repeatedly infantilised, or just existing in the world as a disabled person; there actually might be no such thing as one world we live in together, but a plurality of worlds that we each experience based on our own bodies, neurotypes, geographical and social positions, worlds that we cannot fully express to other people, that can make communication difficult, but also so much more precious.

The last essay is on Race and Radicalism in Appalachian Poetics, a topic I must say I know very little about. It talks about Don West (1906 – 1992), a white American poet that was a civil-rights activist, anti-fascist, socialist and a good ally to other social justice causes. Apart from the historical value of the essay, it also raises two points:

Maybe we should stop making excuses for people – writers, politicians, philosophers – living 50 or 100 years ago because they didn’t know better, or they couldn’t have known better. The truth is they really could have known better and they should have known better and we are allowed to criticise them for it, while still looking at their work with actual interest. I know it’s very hard to believe, but this is possible, it doesn’t have to be either cancelling someone or eternally loving them;
Even people like Don West, who seem to be great, to have everything sorted out, to be on the right side of everything, they still have faults and even if it seems they don’t, they cannot be the center of our liberation movements. They can be allies, joining the fight, but they cannot lead it, they cannot be the ones making the requests, when the people fighting for their own liberation can do it and will definitely do it a lot better.

So yeah, let’s just stop idolising people, I guess?

In terms of actual poems, there are some breathtaking pieces. I loved most of them so I am going to mention those that stayed with me, that I am still thinking about sometimes:

Kareem Tayyar’s Personal History and Dream Journal

If you cup your hands as a hard rain begins
then you are days away from falling in love.

If you find that you cannot run when you want to
then there is a book that you need to reread.

If you awaken in a field of strawberries
then a long journey awaits you.

If you eat the strawberries
then you won’t be going alone.

all of Marissa Davis‘ poems

David A. Reyes’ La Equis – probably my favourite and by far the most radical

all Sebastian has to say is

controversy is always good because if there
wasn’t any, the piece wouldn’t have any sense.
It would have been mediocre.

Mr. Sebastian, you’re a really smart guy—controversy is good
at the expense of the people? How does your meal taste
when you turn on Televisa to see the bodies littered?

Look at you, good sir, with your big shiny award
from el presidente. I can’t blame you and your friends,
Sir Sebastian; there is a whole lot of grimy money to burn.

the absolutely gripping poem written by Alison Thumel about grief that concludes this issue in the best possible way.

Like most human bodies, most buildings
have full lives, and then they die.

I am writing this as I am waiting for the February issue to be delivered to me so let’s hope it’s going to be just as good.

Mohammed El-Kurd – ‘Rifqa’

Posted on 11 Jan 2022 by Gabriela

I’m still not sure how to write about this book. This didn’t feel like anything I’ve read before at it definitely didn’t feel like a debut. It felt like someone that wrote so much poetry they had poetry in their breath, their laugh and, more than anywhere else, their pain.

Mohammed El-Kurd learned from his grandmother, Rifqa El-Kurd, that men on TV saying Be patient! For after patience comes relief! are lying. After patience comes the grave! And he isn’t patient. He isn’t waiting anymore for the US to stop funding and supporting the ethnic cleansing that is still taking place in occupied Palestine or for the UK to say something about the crimes against humanity that they are both directly and indirectly, by lack of action, supporting.

I don’t have time for paranoia. Won’t flip rocks or look for merit in the death threats. If they come for me, let them: I’ve made my amends. Would be content is my coffin. It is those stuffing sand in my mouth that worry me most saying there are softer ways to say this. Thing is I don’t want to be soft. Don’t want to humanize shit. Look at my limbs, look at this earth.
“Kroger”

Born on the 15th of May, the day of the year which commemorates Nakba Day (Nakba literally means Catastrophe – the Catastrophe Palestinians have been living for over half a century), Mohammed El-Kurd voices the Palestinians’ struggle, resistance and fight for the revolution. As he explains in the afterword, he tries to do this differently from other media approaches: pro-Israel media paints Palestinians as terrorists that deserve what they are getting, while pro-Palestine media tends to paint the people they are defending as victims without agency, defenceless children, women, old or disabled people. But we don’t need to pity Palestinians, we need to see their power and support it, we need to understand their fight and join it. I’m sure El-Kurd’s poetry can be read in so many different ways by all the different people that hopefully will get to read it, but I am a white woman living in the UK and of course my reading experience was intrinsically linked to my allyship, even though the book is not actually saying anything about that. And I know that most of my readers are in a similar situation to mine (very rarely do my blog’s statistics show any activity anywhere else but in Europe or North America) so this is a warning and an invitation:

If you ask me where I’m from it’s not a one-word answer.
Be prepared seated, sober, geared up.
If hearing about a world other than yours
makes you uncomfortable,
drink the sea,
cut off your ears,
blow another bubble to bubble your bubble and the pretense.
Blow up another town of bodies in the name of fear.
“This Is Why We Dance”

As I was saying, this is not really a book for allies. It’s also not NOT a book for allies. It’s a book for anyone who listens, but it’s mainly a book for the Palestinians that have started and endured the fight, for those that are still part of it and for the future Palestinians that might have to continue it or that maybe won’t, that will get to live in a world in which free Palestine is a reality, not a chant.

Bush sits beside me on the train.
Iraq veteran cites his fear of fireworks,
They think they’re the only ones
with PTSD. We’re literate
in peeling off our own skin to sleep.
We live like walking debris,
swallow snakes, swallow whole pharmacies,
wrap our spines around the fingers
of bank tellers, while Bush is at a Joanne’s
picking the perfect blue.
“Bush”

On top of the portrayal of the Palestine fight, the poet also questions the stereotype associated with poetry: it always needs to come from a place of unhappiness, pain, poor mental health, or suicidal tendencies. He questions the extent to which poetry (and literature in general) is a tool, both in issues of social justice and in normal life, whatever that is. And it’s a very valid worry: as more and more people from marginalised groups enter the mainstream, where will we get? Will they get pacified, silenced, ignored, or finally acknowledged and listened to?

I have only one negative thought about this poetry collection: what if I’ve already read the best book of 2022 in the first week of January?

Sally Rooney – “Beautiful World, Where Are You”

Posted on 7 Dec 20217 Dec 2021 by Gabriela

I just finished reading Beautiful World, Where Are You and I am suggesting maybe changing the title into Good LGBTQIAP+ Representation, Where Are You.

Before going into my main critique of this book, I want to say that I actually enjoyed reading it (and it took me under two days to finish it) and that I loved Rooney’s writing style.

The book is about Alice and Eileen, two adult women that are best friends. Alice is a successful published author – she has published two books, just like Sally Rooney before writing this one and it feels at times that the character is the writer’s way of expressing her own views, experiences and struggles as a writer. Eileen works at a literary magazine and is nowhere near as successful as Alice, but that doesn’t stop them from being very close. The book starts when Alice moves to a new house in the countryside for a while and it alternates chapters in which we can read the emails the two friends send to each other regularly – in which they express their worries about society (touching concepts such as class, capitalism in decay, socialism), about art, beauty, and their more intimate experiences and questions – and narrative chapters in which we see the two navigate their almost-relationships with Felix, a man Alice meets on Tinder, and Simon, Eileen’s childhood friend and crush. And that’s it. That’s the plot. Nothing really happens and I loved that. Even the ending is boring as hell and that didn’t really bother me. The book is very character-driven and Rooney is amazing at creating the atmosphere for those characters to be themselves, to show themselves, to be vulnerable at times, foolish and to make you like them and hate them at the same time. I don’t know if the purpose was to get us to like the characters, but I definitely didn’t. Even when I found myself feeling very close to some of Alice’s experiences, I didn’t like her, I just wanted to keep digging into her mind, her thoughts, her structure.

So, given that I loved almost everything about this book, what exactly is the issue? Both Alice and Felix express that they are not heterosexual – as far as I remember, we know that Alice is bisexual, but we don’t really know the label Felix uses, except for the fact that he is both into men and women. And that’s great, isn’t it? We love some LGBTQIAP+ representation, don’t we? Yes, we do, but this book is a prime example of how you’re not supposed to do it. The characters’ queerness has absolutely no relevance to anything in the book: Alice used to be in love with a woman, Felix texts a guy on Tinder and tries hitting on Simon, but that’s the extent of queer representation in this book. While I’m all for having people’s sexualities and gender identities just being a part of them and not the central aspect of their character, I cannot help myself from thinking this representation is performative at best and disingenuous at worst. Especially when the two relationships depicted in the book are very heteronormative and have very obvious gender roles: the men are a bit emotionally illiterate, not that in touch with their feelings; the women are maybe too emotional, even unstable; Alice falls in love first, Felix is much slower to express such feelings; Eileen is the damsel in distress, the princess, Simon is the masculine man, the protector, the saviour.

In the case of Eileen and Simon, there is an attempt at deconstructing the dynamics they have, but it’s quite shallow and it doesn’t even begin to understand how gender roles play an important role in it – it’s discussed as if these are just individual features of the characters and not a systemic way in which AFAB and AMAB people are being brainwashed to think that’s how they need to act.

Alice and Felix are a different thing. This is not bi-erasure – bi people dating people at the other end of the gender spectrum does not make them straight and this is not something anyone is allowed to say (like for real, this is ban-worthy behaviour). However, exactly because bi people stay bi in all their relationships, there is always some queerness there. As a pan person myself, I can never really shed this identity, all my relationships are queer and I see that in the way I approach gender norms and other social constructs in all areas of a relationship. That doesn’t happen for Alice and Felix. And that disappointed me, because it would have been the kind of representation bi/pan/polysexual people rarely get and I was really excited for it. I am not sure whether Sally Rooney had the situated knowledge to write that relationship in a different way, as I know nothing about her sexuality and, while she is married to a man, I’m not going to assume anything. However, if she really wanted to include queerness in her book, there’s a lot of ways of getting the information needed to make it right, but there’s really no effort put into that.

And I think this speaks to a wider problem. Representation of LGBTQIAP+ people in media is very important, indeed. However, it’s not enough to just have characters that are queer if we do not deconstruct the cisheteronormative way in which our world and therefore the media functions. Representation is more than labels: it’s understanding, it’s authenticity, it’s depth. And we deserve to get that.