I’m a little brain dead. A little under the weather. A little out of sorts. A little tired. Of so many things in this hellish time. With 1 in every 200 Palestinians having been slaughtered by the Zionist war-machine, ably abetted by the pols and the arms sellers in the West, our governments, you know, I’m not sure what to say…
So this piece is pretty much just a list of the books I’ve been reading recently. An escape. A hope for a better future.
First, The Glutton, by A K Blakemore.
Loosely based on the true story of an 18th Century French peasant and his insatiable desire to eat. I like how Tarare seems me, to be a metonym for the unlimited appetite for killing that the French Revolution came to represent…
In Land of Milk and Honey, by C Pam Zhang, there’s my favourite pig — the Berkshire — protected, preserved, not in aspic, but stored, ready, along with many other species of flora and fauna, underground in a billionaire’s Italian mountain-top bunker to be cooked by the female chef protagonist. A book about desire and longing and sex. And food. Lots of food.
Highly recommended
Isabel Waidner, queer, German born but English by choice has written We Are Made Of Diamond Stuff.
Described as
A 36 year old that looks like Eleven from Stranger Things works in a run-down hotel on an Isle of Wight battered by austerity. Polar bears emerge from t-shirts. Reebok Classics come to life. Blending fiction and critical writing and anarchic joy, this is a rakish, boundary erasing work that collides literary aesthetics with working class cultures and attitudes. Interrogating autobiographical material, it extends the avant-garde tradition to make it an ally for queer migrant experience, questions dreams of national belonging, while celebrating the radical potential of resistance, ingenuity, and friendship.
it’s fun, surreal, challenging. Enjoy their work.
Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman has an unusual centre-piece. A plug-ugly sea-dwelling blob.
I can see this being set in a similar time-line to Land Of Milk and Honey, with money and power and greed and grift prevailing, a satirical, mischievous “meaning-of-life” piece of writing, where artificial intelligence controls everything and enterprises turn animal extinction into a business venture with humans trying tried to control and mitigate everything down to the last detail. And we all know how well that goes..
And finally, there’s Oval by Elvia Wilks, a Berlin-based bit of uture fiction.
In the near future, Berlin’s real estate is being flipped in the name of “sustainability,” only to make the city even more unaffordable; artists are employed by corporations as consultants; and the weather is acting strange. In search of affordable housing, young couple Anja and Louis move into a community on an artificial mountain, The Berg—yet another “eco-friendly” initiative run by a corporation called Finster. They’re offered a home rent-free in exchange for keeping quiet about the seriously malfunctioning infrastructure of the experimental house.
But when Louis returns home from his mother’s funeral in America, Anja is convinced he has changed. He seems to be in denial of his grief and newly idealistic, consumed by a secret project at the NGO where he works as an artist-consultant. Anja is horrified when she discovers what Louis has invented: a pill called Oval that temporarily rewires the user’s brain to be more generous. Louis is convinced that if he can introduce the drug into the Berlin club scene, he can finally remedy the income disparity that has made Berlin so unlivable.
Oval is a fascinating portrait of the unbalanced relationships that shape our world, as well as a prescient warning of what the future may hold. ©GoodReads
And finally, finally, for the next time we’re in Berlin, comes this destination, an as yet, still not open, yakitori grill place. Described by a German friend, Florian Siepert, thus
“Want to know how a yakitori restaurant run by Burnt Ends and Yardbird alumni ranks in Berlin? Yeah, easily Top 3, life altering. Tori Kabin is incredible.”