Heron on a Hot Tin Roof – 27/07/2024

‘Have you ever seen tree roots bubbling up from beneath concrete, or flowers bursting through cracks in the pavement? The jolt of recognition, that beneath the drab mundanity of the everyday the organic is all around us, striving to break through, up from the earth and into the light? In its design, the first edition of Leaves of Grass creates a similar feeling. Everything about it indicates organicism, spontaneous and natural growth. Everything about it seems alive.’

Slow, careful reading is required for Strange Relations by Ralf Webb. Webb’s writing, rich in detail and style, asks that you afford it the same attention with which he has turned to his subjects and objects: Carson McCullers, Tennessee Williams, John Cheever and James Baldwin.

The book lays its foliage foundations with an examination of Whitman, his multiple poet-guises and his philosophy of the spectrum of desire between men, termed ‘adhesiveness’.

From this beginning grow portraits of these authors and their struggles with sexuality, masculinity and the possibilities of relationships in their lives and in their art. The verbal pictures will lead you to visual ones too, real and imagined: here are McCullers and Williams on stage looking delighted with the audience and each other; here is McCullers looking at a photograph of herself in the window of a bookshop. One may also feel that the whole book should be read with a picture of Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire in sight. It won’t be the same picture by the end.

And so, this week books seem to be all about bodies and boundaries, Brando, brands, (brandy? – I’ll let you find out), not to mention adhesiveness in various manifestations.  

Acts of Creation by Hettie Judah both celebrates the artist as mother and examines neglected depictions of motherhood from ancient goddess artefacts to modern day explorations. The writing and the artworks discussed are stunning and the book’s contents all a lot messier than those Madonna and Child paintings that have so dominated this subject.

Engaging with the abstract art of Agnes Martin, the poetry collection With My Back to the World by Victoria Chang explores seeing and being seen and the relationship between creator, artwork and voyeur. Is it possible, Chang asks, ‘For the art to be down the road from the paint? Just once I want to look in the mirror and wonder, What is that?’  

In Burning Angel and Other Stories, Lawrence Osborne casts characters whose jobs involve looking and listening closely (an anthropologist, an entomologist, a therapist) and toys with what happens when they lose their power and become the observed. The stories put one on edge. It feels as if one is anticipating that moment when someone glances in a mirror in a film and the sound stops.

The narrator of The Coin by Yasmin Zaher is all too aware of how she is seen, cloaking an obsessively cleaned body in meticulously selected designer clothing. There is one part of her back which her scrubbing cannot reach and here, beneath the skin, she pictures a coin turning, a coin she swallowed as a child and never saw again. One day she abandons her Burberry trench coat, not liking the scent it has picked up in a bathroom, and later sees a man wearing it. She greets him. They leave New York for Paris to consider if ugliness is beautiful and to pull off a heist involving Birkin bags.

If that makes the novel sound fun and glamorous, it is. But it is also about a Palestinian woman living in the US, where she cannot stay indefinitely, unable to return to a homeland which offers no home.  A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: A Palestine Story by Nathan Thrall offers a reality of that country. When his son’s school bus is involved in an accident, Abed Salama rushes to the scene in the West Bank but Milad is gone. Thrall traces how this and other horrific incidents faced by Salama happen every day and could be avoided, showing how politics and destruction affect each moment of the lives of Palestinians.

Written in the aftermath of 7^th October, Fady Joudah’s poetry collection […] addresses this even more urgently though, like Ralf Webb’s writing, it deserves plenty of time devoted to it. The language is by turns full of colour and natural imagery then stark. In one poem, ‘Autumn eggshells toward a gazelle’. In another, ‘In the here and now I sent myself into, I am not who I wished to be in the afterworld.’

An afterworld was not something the main character of The Echoes by Evie Wyld believed in until he woke up there. Forced to watch his still living girlfriend as she grieves, Max begins to realise how much people miss about each other’s lives and how silence allows space for stories to be told.

(In a rather different tone, an opposing issue is faced by the protagonist of The Book of Elsewhere, an immortal soldier longing to die. I haven’t read it yet but am intrigued by this collaboration between China Miéville and Keanu Reeves, despite the shameless cover – spotting the title compared with the author names is almost as hard as killing an immortal.)

Looping seamlessly back to questions of masculinity, our current favourite children’s books address this too. The Boy and the Octopus by Caryl Lewis and Carmen Saldana is about a boy who longs to be able to hide himself, as an octopus can by changing colours, learning to express why he feels this way.

Bumble and Snug and the Jealous Giants by Mark Bradley is the latest in the graphic novel series following the joyful and odd bugpops, who must don their impractical detective hats to catch the thief of the Bugpop Ball Championship trophy.   

In Kicked Out by A. M. Dassu, the sequel to Boy, Everywhere, Ali, Sami and Mark learn that their friend Aadam is at risk of being deported – he is a refugee and has been accused of lying about his age. Together the boys fight to help their friend; together, in the face of harsh realities they can effect change.

Ralf Webb too ends on thoughts of change and togetherness, writing that Tennessee Williams saw the world like an ‘unfinished poem’ which we must finish together. He finds in his subject the remarkable idea that ‘The creation of more equitable, more beautiful societies and modes of living might be like an artistic collaboration’.

May your weekend burst with flowers and literature in tandem,
Lizzie

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