Tag: earlier work
Zombie History Stalks Ukraine – The Atlantic
The Ukrainian writer Tanja Maljartschuk’s novel Forgottenness broods upon what I’d call zombie history. There are other terms for inherited memory of catastrophic events experienced by one’s forebears, such as intergenerational transmission of trauma and postmemory. But the past in this novel rises from the grave and takes possession of the bodies of the living. Memories resurface as tics, gestures, obsessions—the condensations of meaning that Freud called neurotic symptoms. Sometimes these show up in the personally traumatized. Much
Cormac McCarthy Has Never Been Better
The Passenger and Stella Maris, Cormac McCarthy’s new novels, are his first in many years in which no horses are harmed and no humans scalped, shot, eaten, or brained with farm equipment. But you would be wrong to assume that the world depicted in these paired works of fiction, published a month and a half apart, is a cheerier place. “There are mornings when I wake and see a grayness to the world I think was not in