Thursday, October 25, 2018

Week 7

The fact that this crisis is "slow-moving" just means it isn't being treated like the genuine emergency it is.

My girlfriend recently finished reading Helen Oyeyemi's Boy, Snow, Bird. When she asked if I'd heard of it, I knew that I had, but my best guess was that it was something that'd passed through The New Inquiry's orbit a few years back. Anything more specific was beyond my recollection.

The guess was closer than I thought. Shortly after, my girlfriend sent me an essay written by none other than Hannah Black, a writer/artist I admire very much, and whose work I may even have encountered for the first time through this review of Oyeyemi's novel. Re-reading it now, her review is a work of art all to itself. The novel, still a structuring absence to me, opens up into a densely-layered creation through Black's reading. A lot of thought went into both written works.

(I often encounter film reviews which have that effect on me, but persuasive book reviews seem much rarer. Between this serendipity and the force of Black's writing, it feels like a celestial alignment has brought Boy, Snow, Bird back to my attention, and I'd be foolish to let it slip away in digital fog again.)

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