A slender, beautifully bound blue hardback showed up on my desk. Its pages were creamy, its typeface clear in a formal, old-fashioned way. Each page number was picked out in scarlet. It was a book to put Kindle out of business, so covetable that, I almost thought, it scarcely mattered what it contained. It was then I noticed its curious title, Things I Don’t Want to Know, and a quotation, picked out on the cover in pink type: “To become a WRITER I had to learn to INTERRUPT, to speak up, to speak a little louder, and then LOUDER, and then to just speak in my own voice which is NOT LOUD AT ALL.”
The writer is Deborah Levy, shortlisted last year for the Man Booker for her marvelous novel Swimming Home. Things I Don’t Want to Know is published by Notting Hill Editions, a small, choice, independent publisher committed to “reinvigorating the essay as a literary form.” They came up with the idea of commissioning writers to respond to essays of distinction. Levy has had George Orwell’s Why I Write (1946) at her elbow.
Starting to read her response was like chancing upon an oasis. The writing is of such quality that you want to drink it in slowly. Orwell said: “Good prose is like a windowpane.” He would have approved of Levy, although he might have been surprised by what she sees through the glass. The essay is a mini-memoir that moves between three countries: Mallorca (to which she flies to reflect), South Africa (where she grew up and where her father, an ANC supporter, was imprisoned) and England (where she describes her teenage years as a baffled exile in lime-green platform shoes in Finchley, north London).
In “Why I Write,” Orwell entertainingly declared: “All writers are vain, selfish and lazy and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.” He divided reasons for soldiering on into “sheer egoism,” “aesthetic enthusiasm,” “historical impulse” and “political purpose.”
Like Orwell, Levy is entertaining and makes his categories her chapter headings. But, unlike Orwell, she is not steadily organized. She is a maker not a clearer-upper of mysteries. And she is fugitive. It is this that gives the book its subtle, unpredictable, surprising atmosphere.
The opening line hooks one instantly: “That spring when life was hard and I was at war with my lot and simply couldn’t see where there was to get to, I seemed to cry most on escalators at train stations.” She writes about depression, without naming it, in a blackly funny way. She describes directionlessness yet knows where she is going: the essay is immaculately planned. There are many wonderful lines: “When happiness is happening it feels as if nothing else happened before it, it is a sensation that happens only in the present tense.” Or: “A female writer cannot afford to feel her life too clearly. If she does, she will write in a rage when she should write calmly.” Even the coat hangers in an irregular Mallorcan hotel are perfectly described: “four bent wire clothes hangers on the rail, they seemed to mimic the shape of forlorn human shoulders.”
And speaking of shoulders — she gives a startling picture of women shouldering society’s expectation that, as mothers, they can continue to travel light. Cyril Connolly wrote about the “pram in the hall” as the “enemy of good art.” Orwell did not wheel a pram into his essay at all. Levy does better with her buggy. She does not know what to do with the formidable younger self who stalks the downbeat mother she has become. She suggests that her experience is commonplace: “We didn’t really know what to do with her, this fierce, independent young woman who followed us about, shouting and pointing the finger while we wheeled our buggies in the English rain.” A single line sums up the problem: “If we felt guilty about everything most of the time, we were not sure what it was we had actually done wrong.”
She does not take issue with Orwell (he would admire the way she weaves South African politics into her narrative), but her triumph is to show that the will to write may not always be rational. From the start, as a teenager scribbling on napkins in London’s cafes, she was making it up as she went along. She quotes Polish theater director Zofia Kalinska: “We always hesitate when we wish for something. In my theatre, I like to show the hesitation and not to conceal it.” Levy adds: “It is the story of this hesitation that is the point of writing.” It gives one — as does everything in this original, dreamy, unmissable essay — pause for thought.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
Peter Brighton was amazed when he found the giant jackfruit. He had been watching it grow on his farm in far north Queensland, and when it came time to pick it from the tree, it was so heavy it needed two people to do the job. “I was surprised when we cut it off and felt how heavy it was,” he says. “I grabbed it and my wife cut it — couldn’t do it by myself, it took two of us.” Weighing in at 45 kilograms, it is the heaviest jackfruit that Brighton has ever grown on his tropical fruit farm, located