Tag: Books

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Mimetic anonymity voice control

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Trained as a Soprano for music theatre in the 1990s, at a stage school in New York, she learnt to control her voice into mimetic anonymity to fit the female characters of Walt Disney films and Broadway musicals. Mastering the problem of her vocal break the passaggio  the yodel-ish sound  that happens to everyone when their voice moves register, from chest to head was critical for stamping out individuality in her voice. In Vocal Break, Lauren Elkin seamlessly blends memoir, feminist manifesto and cultural history to explore a plurality of female singing voice- and how women have used them to defy convention, … Continue reading Mimetic anonymity voice control

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Monsters within her…

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Costa award-winning, women’s prize-shortlisted author of Unsettled Ground, Clare Fuller’s mystery novel centres on a woman with bearlike features with a grip on reality. Hunger & Thirst begins “All everyone want to know about is the murder and what we did with the body: armchair detectives, tabloid journalists, the curious and the ghoulish, speculating on what happened.” The narrator is a middle-aged woman who, is reclusive sculptor, but most of the story is told in flashback to 1987, 36 year earlier, from the perspective of her 16-year-old self. After a childhood trauma and years in and out of the care … Continue reading Monsters within her…

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Eponymous hero, Man of Steel displaying duty and desire, love and obligation

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Erica Wagner’s Wash tells the story of a boy Washington Roebling growing up in Pennsylvania under the eye of a brutal but brilliant father. He is a young man at college, enduring the choices that have been made for him and finding brightness and beauty all the same. He is a soldier in a dreadful war who- despite that awful conflict- finds an extraordinary woman who was the love of his life, and her tale inextricably twines with is. He is an engineer who builds one of the great wonders of the modern world. His life holds the possible and … Continue reading Eponymous hero, Man of Steel displaying duty and desire, love and obligation

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Oppression turns into rebellion as children stripped of their innocence

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Tahmima Anam’s Uprising reveals a group of children witnessing their mothers living lives of cruelty and servitude on a desolate sinking island off the coast of Bangladesh. Bought and sold by Amma, the ruthless madam who was once herself sold into slavery, as the victim becomes the perpetrator, the women have accepted their fates as sex workers. Yet their children weave fantastic tales, imagining that someday they will escape the island and enjoy a life of freedom.  When Kusum Khan, a young educated woman from the city, is brought to the island, she too is subjected to Amma’s violent induction. … Continue reading Oppression turns into rebellion as children stripped of their innocence

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Extending the algorithmic control of Amazon warehouses into every corner of our lives

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Henry Snow, US Labour and economic historian, reminds us that he idea of a building designed round a central inspection tower “was a workplace before it was a prison”, the brainchild of the philosopher’s mechanically minded younger brother Samuel, who fascinated by shipbuilding, undertook a high-level apprenticeship in the late 18th century that equipped him with “both a trademan’s knowledge and bourgeois European science”. Whether on Caribbean plantations in the seventeenth century or in Amazon Warehouses today, the powerful have constantly developed new techniques to control workers- and new justifications for doing so. Ideas of control perfected on the factory floor … Continue reading Extending the algorithmic control of Amazon warehouses into every corner of our lives

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Mysteries of male friendship

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Andrew Meehan’s Hey Man is the story of Ian and Tommy, whose rich and tender friendship stretches across three fateful decades. The story begins in 1989, when seventeen-year-old Dubliner Ian, a lonely teenager finds himself lodging with his father’s cousin, thirty-year-old actor Tommy Carmody in London. He needs to get away from the family home: his mother is dead and Ian and his father have not only buried her; they’ve buried the memory of her too, distracting themselves with anagram games.  “Eric Clapton, he said. Narcoleptic, I said.”  Tommy will be a change for Ian. He’s “What you ‘d call a character … Continue reading Mysteries of male friendship

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Can a fox be tamed? 

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While some of us crave crime and violence or in depth factual books on politicsor finance as well as self help bibles, some of us feel enlightened and soothedby human interest stories which follow relatively ordinary people and their lifeexperiences especially if animals are involved.So if you want to take a side step and read about Wilf and his foxy friendtogether with elaborate characterisations of many people vital in the story trythis novel which is a debut for Richard Tyrrell who has a degree inPharmacology and has worked as a book reviewer for mainstreet papers andwas a finalist in The … Continue reading Can a fox be tamed? 

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Job nightmare…

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Marcus Kliewer, a writer and stop-motion animator and a  new “titan of the macabre and unsettling” comes a supernatural horror about a young woman who accepts a caretaking job from Craigslist, only to discover the position has consequences far greater- and more dangerous- than  she ever could have imagined. His debut novel “We Used to Live Here began life as a serialised short story Reddit, where it won the Scariest Story of 2021 award on the NoSleep Forum. Film rights were snapped up by Netflix, and it was acquired by Simon & Schuster for publication even before it had been extended into … Continue reading Job nightmare…

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Metamorphosis and morality…

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Silver polisher, Flora, a 40-year-old Londoner visiting her family in Mexico – where Aridjis spent some of her childhood, is bitten on the hand by their dog Diego, who knows her well, but he is old with cataracts and saw nothing but “a disembodied hand”. She winds up in hospital where she undergoes several surgeries under anaesthesia “three surgeries… each time it felt sawn in half and put back together”.  The hospital becomes a hermetic space for Flora, sealed off from the outside world. She meets Wilhelmina, an elderly German woman with pneumonia, who collects pre-cinema toys and instruments. The two … Continue reading Metamorphosis and morality…

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Women plagued by brittle relationships

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Award-winning novelist, Riley who won a Betty Trask and Somerset Maugham award, and a Windham-Campbell prize worth $175,000, from her analyst’s couch, drills into the gaps between her characters to reveal strained relationships with their parents, particularly their mothers set in north of England or in the US.  Palm House is narrated by Laura Miller, a writer living in precarious life of house shares and freelancing in London. Laura Miller and Edmund Putnam is the deputy editor of a literary magazine called Sequence, who have been friends for a long time whose happy meeting of minds, with long evenings spent huddled … Continue reading Women plagued by brittle relationships