DOUGLAS FIELD relishes the hard-boiled language, satire and humour of the third and last of the Harlem trilogy
Latest editorial
Weighty meditation on the traumatic heart of darkness
STEPHANIE BROWN draws attention to the hidden labour of the female embroiderers, and how a 19th century replica made no such error
MIK SABIERS revels in a band that ploughs an idiosyncratic furrow of expletive laden, guitar-driven alt rock
ANDY HEDGECOCK, MARIA DUARTE and ANGUS REID review Synthetic Sincerity, Our Hero, Balthazar, Heartstopper Forever, and A Year In London
The bard invites readers to a gig, raps for Clacton, and lays out the Burnham-Hurzeler conundrum
RON JACOBS recommends an important book that enhances the oppositional theories put forth by Fanon and, in doing so, remakes psychology itself
The Weight of Things
by Marianne Fritz
(Verso, £9.99)
BEST-KNOWN for the cycle of novels called The Fortress, the late Austrian writer Marianne Fritz has been compared to James Joyce for an experimental style of writing which caused her proofreader to quit in exasperation at her intentional misspellings and deliberate grammatical violations.
There’s little such experimentation in evidence in her debut novel The Weight of Things, the first of her works to be translated into English by Adrian Nathan West. It is nonetheless concerned with the subject that was to dominate her books — understanding the disaster of Western civilisation.
Similar stories
FIONA O’CONNOR questions the achievement of this year’s Orwell prize winner for political fiction
CAL McBRIDE relishes the lyrical truth of an unstable identity in an over-tidy and conventional social realist treatment
Rita Di Santo speaks to Hungarian director LASZLO NEMES about his new film, a portrait of the French Resistance leader and hero, Jean Moulin
CHRIS MOSS joins the hunt in Argentina for the works of Poland’s most enigmatic exile