Reviews and Comments

Brian Massumi presents a theory on how play works as language and as a substitute for violent action in animal and human actions. It's a fun treatise, well presented in a longer first section before three other supplements that look at praxis of the ideas presented. The first of these is a pure joy to read.

This book is very dense philosophy, and at times it feels preposterously filled with jargon even if Massumi felt that language was necessary for accuracy. Yet it is also full of wonderful moments and deep thoughts that challenge human exceptionalism and create ways to consider other-than-human engagement from a nonhuman frame. It draws heavily from Deleuze and Guattari and often the writing feels like their more playful style, pushing the boundaries of what language can do. This is best illustrated in the supplementary chapter 'To Write Like a Rat Flicks Its Tail', which thinks with Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis to explore being-animal through art.

I adore Clarice Lispector, whose prose and presentation is unlike any other author I have read. This novel, like all of her work, is brilliantly written, unique, and uncanny.

The story of Lucrétia Neves living in the township of Sao Geraldo is one of passing time. As she watches the horses and the city, it transforms in front of her eyes, in transforms because of her watching it. Her life changes and moves away, but she drags herself and her new life back into that world. The book is amazing for how it presents the changing world, the evolution of a city through the eyes of a person, and the growth of a self through the eyes of themselves and others.

Unfortunately, it suffers from its strengths, particularly in the early sections where the weirdness is too much, too repetitive, even though this is partly the point. But as an experiment, the book is a gift from an amazing writer.

There are few writers like Patrick Freyne that can make me laugh until tears roll from my eyes and I drop the book on the floor. Even fewer can force me to expel a whimper a few sentences later with a punch-in-the-gut moment of care or grief. And as a journalist, he does this every week with The Irish Times.

This is a book of memoir essays, not my favourite writing form but one that fits Freyne's style. He meanders between comedy and tragedy easily, including hilarious anecdotes of his childhood, his pirate radio misadventures and his band tours (I loved the NPB before he was ever a writer and really enjoyed reading those stories) interspersed with deep, thoughtful essays of his work in a care home or as a journalist. While I loved the laughs, the more touching chapters were the ones that will stay with me. I am left with new thoughts on care and compassion, as well as an increased respect for good journalism. A couple of the essays don't say much, but overall this is a really enjoyable and touching read by an excellent journalist and writer.

I love Mike McCormack's prose and imagination. This Plague of Souls is of his more sinister canon, trailing out a mystery of a protagonist who has arrived home from prison to an empty house, void of his wife and child, and where he receives continuous phone-calls from an unnamed caller who seems obsessed with how he got out of a prison sentence. In the final section, this mystery unspools into another, broader mystery.

While some of the imaginative ideas are rich, such as the backstory of the protagonist and his wife's first living together in rural Ireland, the book failed to form any sense of intrigue. It felt a little like a short story that had been stretched out like an elastic band, that lacked any more content to become whole as a novel. The prose is good throughout, and the book has merit in its involved portrayal of a character who is a chameleon. Enjoyable, not unmissable.