Another short one, but better than nothing, maybe?
There’s a lot of debate these days about the difference between essay, auto-theory, various experimental modes, etc — I would put these squarely in the essay category, in the best version of the form: a text that draws on personal experience (and some literary readings) to meditate on an idea. I’d love to think more about that, but I’m running on four hours of sleep, because I’m doing the Bristol Translates workshop this week, and it meets at UK time, which means that I’m waking up at 5am to have marvelous intense discussions about things like whether to translate brzask as dawn, first light, or daybreak, etc, and I have very little brain power left. Sorry.
So: delightful in the way they exemplify what I think is a noble and not sufficiently appreciated form (because everyone is panting after the new new kinds). The observations are interesting and the way that the interwoven parts of the essays fit together into a larger whole is pleasing. But what really makes this collection astonishing is the prose. It’s so, so beautiful: it has that incredible sharpness and cold sparkle that you find in someone like Rachel Cusk, but without the barely contained sense of hysteria. To be clear, I don’t mean that as a knock on Cusk, but I do think that under the cool detachment often associated with her work, there is a slightly histrionic quality, a sense of total breakdown that is right there under the surface. Whereas in Ogden’s writing one has a sense of the entire spectrum of human experience, including the fullness of moments of warmth and joy and pleasure, and the language manages to capture all of it, in a surprisingly wide-ranging way.
Kasia Reads 