Vivid examples of literature's power to help us understand our circumstances.
A new anthology looks at surveillance and its effects through the lens of fiction.
In 2013, PEN American Center issued a report called “Chilling Effects,” tracing the influence of government surveillance on literature. Of the 500-plus writers surveyed, more than 25 percent had backed away from controversial material or “considered doing so.” Clearly, the 32 contributors to “Watchlist” didn’t get the memo. Gathering short fiction from, among others, T.C. Boyle, Aimee Bender, Lincoln Michel, Dana Johnson, and Jim Shepard, editor Hurt offers an array of responses to our culture of snooping, from the fantastic to the mundane. In Cory Doctorow’s “Scroogled,” a man passing through San Francisco International Airport is greeted by a sign declaring, “Immigration—Powered by Google”: a terrifying conflation yet at the same time oddly credible. Juan Pablo Villalobos’ “Terro(tour)istas” begins with that most mundane of contemporary acts, the liking of a Facebook post, before spiraling dangerously out of control. Most trenchant, perhaps, is Charles Yu’s “Coyote,” which imagines an organization in which the watchers are watching one another, noting small talk and lunch options, “a prepackaged chicken salad from Whole Foods” or a glass of the house red. “Carol,” Yu writes, “if she is looking into your file, knows you are investigating Henry. And therefore investigating her, albeit indirectly. And now you know that she knows that. And you also know that she doesn’t know that you know she knows.” There you have it, the whole ridiculous loop in a nutshell, observation for its own sake, with no strategic goal. This is the world we’ve constructed, in which information is no longer power but a mechanism of social restraint. Or, as Hurt puts it, in a smart and personal introduction, “The more we know about each other, the less we actually know.”
Vivid examples of literature's power to help us understand our circumstances.Pub Date: May 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-936787-41-8
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Catapult
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
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