Category: Book reviews

“Alice and Kasim stood peering through the French windows: the interior seemed to be a vision of another world, its stillness pregnant with meaning, like a room seen in a mirror. The rooms were still furnished with her grandparents’ furniture; wallpaper glimmered silvery behind the spindly chairs, upright black-lacquered piano and bureau. Paintings were pits…

“You have to stop this, she said. Stop what, he said, we’re not doing anything. She wanted to correct him. There was no we. There was he the subject and her the object, but he just told her look, there’s no point getting worked up over nothing.” from Natasha Brown’s Assembly These are the opening…

“There’s a villa near my house that once belonged to a wealthy family, with grounds that attract children and dogs. I like to go in the late morning to walk along the shaded paths. I pass a giant birdcage, as large as a two-story house, with a lovely cupola at the top. It no longer…

“This was her own room, the room that had been hers since childhood. It was at the back of the house, on the third floor, and its windows overlooked the garden. She stood for a while by the window, and stared down where the garden was. She yielded for a moment to the disappointment that…

“There was not only nothing nice, there was nothing definite at all to remember, only a great many years that had passed along and were now finished, leaving only the remnants of themselves—herself, Hubert, the furniture; even the plants in the garden only seemed to hold their position in order to mark the shabbiness of…

“In the kitchen, my mother is dressing big pieces of blue tilapia fish, which she says was imported directly from the Congo River. It’s late in the afternoon, and I am thinking of one thing most specifically. How many men have I made this exact meal for? How many women? How many friends, lovers, acquaintances?…

“As if the day had turned inside out, as if what she was leaving behind was not enclosed, lost, entombed in a house. It had merged somehow—pouring itself outwards—with the air she was breathing. She would never be able to explain it, and she would not feel it any the less even when she discovered,…

 “It has always seemed to Starlight that words had edges to them. Not so much like endings or finalities but more like where they stopped. There was an edge there like the lip of a cliff where words came to teeter, the brink of their flow sudden, exhilarating in the shock of the drop at…

   “This is the dream: Lawrence is alone. It is not quite dark, between a wolf and a dog; a mauve light is deepening like a bruise, the cold breath of the wind a low moan in his ear.     He stands on what feels to be the highest point in a landscape that…

There is something controversial about memory, especially when we think of it as being synonymous with truth and honesty. Can we rely on our memories like we rely on photographs or on diary entries?  In a sense, they are all we have when we look back on moments in our lives and try to outline…