![]() ![]() My recommendation: Pick this up, leave any preconceptions aside, and dive right in. This book, like Orwell’s, is made up of a cast of animals, but the comparisons grow weaker from there. Bulawayo’s book traverses new territory on its own radically creative terms. ![]() In this case, the comparison is warranted but also limiting. ![]() I mention this because just about every appraisal - including this one, unfortunately - you will read of NoViolet Bulawayo’s latest, brilliant novel, Glory, will reference Animal Farm by George Orwell. The supposed advantages of this approach are manifold: The older book might provide a point of entry for readers who are unwilling to do the work of understanding the newer book on its own terms, and the newer book can shine in the reflected glory of the older one as the wan moon to the older book’s sun. There is a long tradition in literary criticism of evaluating a new book by a writer from a marginalized community from the vantage point of an older book - usually by a white male writer. Wilson’s translation notes alone are a delight - translating Sophocles, she aims for an idiom that is “fluent, humane, natural, and also markedly artful sometimes conversational, but never slangy … sometimes odd, but never stiff or unintentionally obscure.” Wilson’s verse captures the rich density of ancient poetry, and her notes also offer surprisingly funny insights into the play’s original context: An abundance of foot puns would sound less ridiculous to Athenian ears, and a final line she describes as “hokey” is characteristic of the “simplistic moralizing” that is “fairly common at the end of Athenian tragedy.” - Erin Schwartz Best way to use earth spar in war of beach full#The new Norton Library edition of her translation of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos (also known by its Roman title, Oedipus Rex, which Wilson describes as a spoiler) is full of the historiographical precision and literary clarity I associate with Wilson’s other works, including her 2018 translation of The Odyssey. M.C.Įmily Wilson is one of my favorite working classicists I’ve followed her since she wrote a deliciously biting review of a Hesiod translation for the New York Review of Books. This is more than a clever reframing of sci-fi tropes, although it’s that, too the employees’ voices themselves, some of them desperate, some of them meditative, form a touching, alienated chorus, narrating a tragedy that for many will ring eerily true. Unsurprisingly, labor peace eludes the ship, and a workplace novel devolves into a full-blown horror story, leaving behind few survivors. To stave off melancholy - another deterrent to work - they’re given child holograms and stimulating objects with which to interact. The Employees, translated from Danish by Martin Aitken, is made up of interviews with these workers, some of whom are human, others humanoid, although the distinction is at times made unclear. Such nostalgia is not productive and is bound to interfere with their work performance. Īboard the Six-Thousand Ship, sometime in the 22nd century, employees are encouraged to be present-minded lest they lose themselves to memories of Earth and of their left-behind loved ones. Read Jennifer Wilson’s review of Pure Colour. And she loved her meager little existence, which was entirely her own.” - Maddie Crum Of Mira’s work in the lamp store, for example, she writes, “The red and green stones shed its light upon her dark face and the white walls. The directness of Heti’s writing renders even her most twee scenes into something affecting. In the meantime, Heti relates the life of Mira, an aesthete, a critic, and a seller of fine lamps, as she grieves her father, whose corpse she’s taken up residency with inside of a leaf. In Pure Colour, God is preparing to scrap the first draft of existence and replace it with something better - a state of being that’s more humane, more egalitarian, and perhaps less vain. Sheila Heti’s last two novels, How Should a Person Be? and Motherhood, treated self-doubt as a formal project: What shape can a writer give her own indecisiveness? Then, just as some parents of newborns find purpose and clarity, she emerged with a book full of declarations. ![]()
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