Reviews and Comments

It's hard to know whether this book is made more or less enjoyable if you already know who Bill Drummond is. I have followed his work for years so was prepared for his mischievousness. I was less prepared for his open and honest thoughtfulness. As he described his epic quest to sell a Richard Long artwork that he had once bought and loved for the same $20,000 price that he had originally paid, I laughed a lot at the various side-plots, encounters, and inner monologues about art, the UK, journeys and the rest. Drummond is a genuinely funny and thoughtful writer.

In the end, the project becomes a bit unwieldy and less fun in the epilogues (saved a little by the very last story). Some of the deviations in Drummond's thought patterns become more about his new projects and he seems too distracted to see this through. But maybe that's part of the journey. Like the Long artwork, this project loses its joy over time. Above all that seems to be one of Drummond's obsessions: that art is transient and that it should be. Maybe that's why he loves Long's work so much, and why he stopped loving a photograph that immortalises it.

Americanah sets out to do what so much great literature does: tell a great human story with an undercurrent of theory. In this, it is the story of young love in Nigeria separated by emigration of the two protagonists: Ifemelu to America and Obinze to England. They experience the dissonance of being non-nationals and racially other in two contexts while also learning to live and becoming themselves.

Only that doesn't really happen. In both stories, the protagonists are like blank canvases surrounded by caricatures of people who are actually alive but are slightly unbelievable. Our heroes observe those around them and summarise their traits as if human beings all present their entire personalities in one quick gesture or comment. The story is interspersed with blog posts written by Ifemelu that feel like the writing of Ta-Nahesi Coates – sharp, witty and unashamedly Black. The undercurrent of theory thus bubbles up constantly to the surface, sometimes angrily, and always justifiably, and so Adichie manages to put more theory into this work of literature than can be found in many works of theory. This is admirable and educational. So it is a pity that they story falls short.

The final section, the return to their home country of a duo who have changed but have not really grown, is the best written section of the book. It suddenly becomes exciting all too late as the ghosts of a past relationship haunt Obinze's marriage and Ifemelu's independence. Maybe there is something to this too – two lives that cannot escape those waves of theory that always run beneath. Imperfect but important.

This book was a surprise to me. I knew very little about the "One Laptop Per Child" programme, and never really set out to learn more. I also did not expect a book about such a niche topic to be interesting enough for a duration. But Morgan G. Ames' brilliant critical analysis is about far more than that programme. It is about techno-utopic dreams and how they get inflated by the charisma of those who come up with them. OLPC was the brainchild of some of the founding members of the MIT Media Lab, and was put forward as a scheme that would empower poor children into becoming keen technologists in the future.

Ames' anthropological writing is sharp and often funny, her analysis is bulletproof, and her conclusions are damning. The programme was a complete failure: The machines were expensive, prone to breaking, under-used, poorly designed for purpose and unpopular with the children. Although those behind it still hail it as at least a part-success.

What Ames does brilliantly is look at how the failures happened, how they are presented as successes, what the motivations behind these presentations are, and how bias is embedded in the (white, male, wealthy) ambitions of those who roll out technological dream-goals like OLPC. The perfect moments come when Ames takes aim at individualism as a learning mechanism, and how the OLPC founding team seem to neglect all the social roles that were involved in their own early love of computers.

The book is a brilliant application of Donna Haraway's methodology for "staying with the trouble" (which Ames references near the end of the book). It is also a very enjoyable read that uses accessible language and ideas and shrewd humour alongside even shrewder analysis.

This world was lucky to host this rascal of an author for a short span of history. Ditto this canny translator.

A thing is missing from this story. What was it again? A symbol? A scrawl? A Zahir? A MacGuffin? Our first protagonist, Anton Vowl, is soon missing too, and not only him but all folks in this plot run a risk of vanishing without warning.

From word to word this book's witty rhythm plays with us. Its dancing vocabulary is astounding (my assumption is this is both in original Francais and this Anglo-translation, or should I say transcription?). With such a constraint as a missing symbol so common you would think A Void would not flow with pizzazz. But its story is solid, occasionally poignant, and also ridiculously good fun. Our author's lists and linguistic quirks can warrant skipping past parts. But still this book is brilliant both in imagination and plot.

This book left me with mixed feelings.



On the one hand, Creative Engagements... is a great anthology of different artists and artworks that engage place with contemporary themes about symbiosis or thinking beyond human. As an anthology, it documents the artworks well and presents the viewpoints in clearly framed chapters, so is a good reference book.



On the other hand, it presents an overarching ideology that encourages a multifaceted look at practice. Then there are glaring contradictions to this: In the first chapter, the book criticises "all encompassing" ideas and universalising beliefs. Then in the next chapter it presents "walking" as a universally obtainable and practiced method of sensing the world, without any acknowledgement of the perspective of those with disabilities (both human and nonhuman, for example wheelchair users or those that are blind).



Although written with the authors' hearts in the right place, I would recommend this more as a documentation and anthology of artworks than as an overriding philosophical or conceptual framework. While the final chapter does round this up well, there are other authors that present the latter much better (suggestions: Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Annemarie Mol or Vinciane Despret).