Spent Light

by Lara Pawson

A woman contemplates her hand-me-down toaster and suddenly the whole world erupts into her kitchen, in all its brutality and loveliness: global networks of resource extraction and forced labour, technologies of industrial murder, histories of genocide, alongside traditions of craft, the pleasures of convenience and dexterity, the giving and receiving of affection and care.

‘“Everything in this damned world calls for indignation,” the woman says at one point. All of it’s there, all interconnected, and she can’t stop looking. The likeness between a pepper mill and a hand grenade, for example, or the scarcely hidden violence of an egg timer.

And what if objects knew their own histories? What if we could allow ourselves to see those weird resonances, echoes, loops, glitches, just as Pawson does so beautifully and unnervingly here?

Genres: Fiction, British Literature, Literary Fiction, Novels

137 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2024

About the author

Lara Pawson lives in London. She is the author of three books.

Spent Light (CB editions, January 2024) is a hybrid work of prose combining fiction, memoir and history. It was shortlisted for the The Goldsmiths Prize 2024 and was a book of the year in the The Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, Frieze magazine, and New Statesman. It has received rave reviews in The Guardian, the TLS, The Telegraph, the Financial Times, The Irish Times, The Spectator, New Statesman, The Idler, and the Daily Mail. It has been translated into Serbian (Prometej, 2024) and Dutch (Koppernik, 2025), and is soon to be published in the United States with McNally Editions.

This Is the Place to Be (CB editions, 2016) is a fragmentary memoir. In 2017, it was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize, the PEN Ackerley Prize, and the Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing. It has been translated into French as Là où tout se passe (Les Éditions de l’Observatoire, 2018) and into Spanish as Este es el lugar (LOM Ediciones, 2021).


In the Name of the People: Angola’s Forgotten Massacre (IB Tauris, 2014) is a work of investigative journalism, memoir and history. It was runner-up for the Royal Africa Society Book of the Year 2015, longlisted for The Orwell Prize 2015, and shortlisted for both the Bread & Roses Award for Radical Publishing 2015 and the Political Book Awards Debut Political Book of the Year 2015. It was translated into Portuguese as Em Nome Do Povo: O massacre que Angola silenciou (Ediçôes Tinta da China, 2014).

Her commentary, essays and reviews have been published in many places and she reviews regularly for The Guardian and the Times Literary Supplement.

Between 1996 and 2007, Lara worked as a journalist, mainly for the BBC World Service. She lived and travelled widely in Angola, Ivory Coast, Mali and Ghana, and also reported from Namibia, Ethiopia, Burkina Faso, Niger and São Tomé & Príncipe. During this period she also wrote for many other publications, including specialist press on Africa, mainstream newspapers, magazines and the wires.

She is represented by Lisa Baker at Aitken Alexander Associates.

Reviews

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shortlisted for the 2024 Goldsmiths Prize - as I had hoped

Lara Pawson's Spent Light opens with an epigraph from Cesare Pavese's Dialogues with Leucò (translated by William Arrowsmith and D. S. Carne-Ross): I have nothing in common with experimentalists, adventurers, with those who travel to strange regions. The surest, and the quickest, way for us to arouse the sense of wonder is to stare, unafraid, at a single object.

Pawson's (autofictional?) narrator turns her stare on to domestic objects, in order to take us with her on a journey to strange regions. It begins with her recalling a neighbour Reg, with a housebound wife the narrator never saw (not even a hand behind the nets behind their clean, closed windows. There were days when I doubted she existed at all. Days when he said he’d taken her to the doctor and he’d gesture at the car, but the car was always empty and cold). But when Reg's wife dies, she inherits her toaster, the first she had owned.

And it's this toaster to which she first turns her gaze:

It has good dimensions. Like those leather handbags that used to be held at the elbow by women of a certain leaning, women who lent their husbands their garters and attended funerals in pillbox hats.

At one end, three buttons the shape of pellets of rat shit. Above each button, a shell of red plastic encases a tiny bulb. If I rub one of these for a moment or two, the dog’s nipple comes to mind, or the trigger pin on an Arma-Lite semi-automatic, or that inarticulate surge of pleasure when your finger closes in on my clitoris.

Above each light, fractionally off centre, a word is printed in the same restrained font found in CIA documents. Together, they form a synopsis of the anthropocene: REHEAT DEFROST CANCEL

To the right of these buttons is a dial the size of an adult anal sphincter. It has a dorsal fin that is the most elegant aspect of the entire machine, sparking visions of a porpoise curling in and out of breaking waves. It is the most sinister, too. Not because the porpoise died with twentythree plastic bags in its stomach and the string from a tampon of a girl who panicked and ran to the sea to secrete this foreign object the only way she knew how, but because the dial controls heat.

Heat, like a sharp rise on the price of bread, can trigger strife. Indeed, in Egypt, bread is known as aysh, which is Arabic for life.

The whole thing is encased in steel stained on one side with the paw prints of a startled cat. It has a skirt, too. A thick black skirt that hides the machine’s feet and the intricate connections that convert electricity into heat. A skirt that turns my thoughts to that old woman who sat across the aisle from us on the bus to Órgiva.

As the long vehicle swept in and out along the twisting road of the Alpujarra, she began to sweat, her hands to fuss, and bile and bits of breakfast congregated between her lips. Then her eyes became wet, she said she couldn’t breathe through her nose, and she held that long white envelope like a cradle to her mouth.

It was only after the final turn into the town that the tension eased. She spread her feet and, from beneath her long black skirt, panting in the heat, the tongue of a solid old dog.

She said she was six when a bullfighter called Pepe pointed a gun at her mother and gave the order to drink from a bottle of castor oil. Aggressive vomiting was followed by rapid labour, the little girl watching as the knot of wet flesh flopped on to the parched street of the beautiful hilltop town. She said she still remembered the smell of her mother’s diarrhoea and the silence that came down like heavy velvet when the brick sunk into her brother’s soft skull.

Because I think of that woman whenever I use the toaster, and because I think of her mother being forced to drink castor oil, sometimes I imagine myself being forced to drink it, too. Sometimes I even imagine myself forcing someone else to drink it.

What would have had to happen to me to make me be so cruel?

(NB I quote extensively as this is from an extract the publisher has made freely available here)

This approach - a domestic object, described in poetic detail, leading to riffs into her own past, sexual imagery and geopolitics including climate change and also institutionalised violence - is typical of the book.

A simple kitchen timer lead her to recall the use of Memopark Swiss Timers by the IRA, sourced for them by a Priest (still to this day unrepentant but thankfully defrocked) and the clinical efficiency of the Nazi's holocaust ovens - domestic appliances used to protect those guilty of mass murder from any risk to themselves or even need to view the results of their own actions.

Pawson was, in an earlier stage of her life, a journalist, mainly for the BBC World Service, in various parts of Africa, and at another point the narrator quotes something she recalls reading or hearing, which I think is from Achille Mbembe's 2016 book Politiques de l'inimitié (I'm quoting Alexander R. Galloway's translation) on Afrofuturism: [Produced from a specific predatory history,] the Black is essentially a human refashioned into a thing, forced to endure the same fate as that of an object or tool.

But there is humour mixed in with the shocking.

And this is distinct from the increasingly common Wiki-novel, with a very personal seam, the novel mainly addressed to an unnamed you, the narrator's partner, and deeply curious about the lives of those she encounters on the streets of London, themselves from all over the world.

Indeed the book is labelled 'Fiction/Memoir/History' by the publisher, the wonderful CB Editions, and Pawson herself has said: "it is a hybrid text combining fiction, history and memoir. You might call it a work of prose fiction. You might call it a prose poem. You could just call it a book."

Impressive - not sure how this passed the Women's Prize judges by but perhaps the hybrid form was outside their remit, but one I hope to see feature in the Goldsmiths Prize.

[Roman Clodia · Rating 3 out of 5]

While this feels definitively postmodern with its loose connections, fragmented nature of thought and deep connections between material objects and the history within in which they exist and which they carry, this also feels like it's still playing in spaces delineated by past writers.

I'm thinking here of Virginia Woolf and her attempts to capture consciousness, Proust for the way his memory is released via the material taste and fragrance of the madeleine and linden tea, of Sebald's ghosts that hover over and through the present, layering time with a particular historical moment.

Pawson adds more wars, more violence, present concerns with torture and late capitalism, with specificities around the female body and the way it's embedded in culture.

It's nicely done; there's a clear intellectual foundation that frames the way the text works, and it's - mostly - interesting to read. But some of it does feel forced: 'standing here, in front of the cooker, peering down on the black grates that straddle the hob, swastikas are what I see. Looking at the dials, turning on the gas, who could fail to consider the camps?' And there's some downright weird stuff about wet pants being like Hitler's hairstyle and moustache...

On the other hand, there are hard-hitting memories (the baby, the raped soldier, the man with his eyes sucked out on p.56, and pertinent questions that are not given pat answers: 'are the struggles led by African men, led by African American men, my struggles too?'

But I found this emotionally cold and just not as thrilling as the literary hype promised. Some clumsy sentences made me frown: 'the shag-pile rug, which was as foamy as waves crashing into Cornish cliffs' - foamy? And one question that keeps running through my head is how innovative is fiction which is 'innovative' in the same way as lots of other so-called innovative fiction - if it's innovative in the same way, then how inventive is it, really?

Keeping this text short so it can be read in a single sitting works in its favour otherwise I might well have skipped straight to the end to finish this: 3-3.5 stars.

[Noam · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Canadian author Sheila Heti was wrong!

The protagonist of this book, ‘I’, a woman, writes to ‘you’, male, with whom she has some kind of a relationship. She tells ‘you’, I mean him, about her life, what’s on her mind, her memories, her own reflections etc.

‘I’ is an intriguing person. She’s quite obsessed by violence, sex and death. And objects. Random everyday objects trigger a flood of images in her: A toaster, a dead squirrel, a pepper mill, a fridge magnet with a picture of Samuel Beckett on it, what’s ever there, around her. Sometimes she even sounds jealous of these objects. Why? Because they are motionless? Because they don’t give a damn?

‘I’’s interior monologue left me with a lot of questions: Why does ‘I’ addresses ‘you’ in such a way? Is she locked up somewhere, maybe in an institution or in jail? Does she want to confess something to ‘you’? Did she kill someone? Did she kill ‘you’? Are ‘you’ dead? Did ‘you’ leave her? Or maybe this is a very peculiar love letter? I do realise these speculations say more about me than about ‘I’, but there is a mysterious tangible threat of something terrible in ‘I’’s story. It made me very suspicious.

I wondered: Is ‘I’’s world loosely based on Lara Pawson’s own experiences? She worked as a journalist and war correspondent. Does one become violent because the world is violent or is it the case that you search for violent experiences because you are already violent? Is this the result of traumatic experiences?



Mentioned on page 67: ’Socks on a radiator’ by Wolfgang Tillmans, 1998 (Via mutualart.com)

A puzzling, absurd, shocking and chilling monologue. It’s hallucinatory, possessed, associative, sometimes funny and sometimes cruel. A 21th century adults’ version of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass in which Alice is under influence of drugs or alcohol or experiencing a psychosis. Or maybe it’s more like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe‘s The Sorcerer's Apprentice? ‘I’ asks ‘you’:

'Will you keep reading if I tell you about the broom? The fat, sturdy one with stiff red bristles sprouting from its head like a crop of wholewheat spaghetti. Normally, it hangs from the pipe above the outdoor toilet, but I've brought it indoors so I can stare at it, unafraid.’ p.107

This one-way conversation reminded me in a sense of Jean Cocteau‘s La voix humaine as well: I really wanted to know how ‘you’ reacts on what ‘I’ says, if at all. Obviously, I had to think of Georges Perec‘s Les Choses too, a book which I just read. In Perec’s novel the protagonist want to own and possess objects. Here all the objects come to life, they may even possess ‘I’.

In 2012 Sheila Heti was criticized because she directly discussed her own love life in a book. Her reaction was:

‘People who look at themselves in order to better look at the world — that is not narcissism. It is, and has always been, what people who make art do, and must do. You cannot do it blind. You cannot do it by looking at a toaster.’

Lara Pawson’s novel is the ultimate proof Sheila Heti was wrong.

A delightful novel.



A 3D model of a toaster (Via Wikimedia Commons)

Quotes

'When the stairlift appeared in the front garden, I knew she was dead. Reg came rushing out of the house and pushed a toaster into my hands. I've a better one in Chingford anyway, he said.' p.2

'The pepper mill feels like a hand grenade made to fit my fist. [...] I can't look at it without seeing myself throwing it from the upstairs window at a man striding up the street with an RPG and a knife. I always see a cat, too. At the side of the road, it is writhing in pain.' p.7-8

'In fact, that was his fourth squirrel, but his sixth kill. The other two were rats, one of which he caught in the dark when he was standing beside me on the edge of the pond where that woman's body was found chopped up inside an IKEA bag. I remember the rat's screams slicing through the night. I remember hearing men fucking in a bush.' p.14

'In 1864, the Alabama was sunk outside Cherbourg, a town I visited to celebrate the achievements of a gynaecologist called Lom. His best friend and lover was a man named Fig. Fig was a classical pianist. He lost a finger during World War II. Ripped off by shrapnel.' p.31

'When I twist my hair and poke the pin up and round and over, as it slides down the back of my scalp, it becomes a weapon in waiting. I wonder what force would be required to push it clean into the chest of a man, to the side of his sternum between two ribs?' p.58

'These were my favourite knickers. They made me feel at once athletic and stern. Every now and then, they opened the way to what I can only describe as my inner boy. The relief was real. But for some time now, whenever I pull them over my feet, around my ankles and all the way up my legs to my arse, I cannot escape the thought that they are the hair that grew from Hitler's scalp. Once they are on, nicely snug, all smoothed out, I feel less that my cunt is stretched over Hitler's head, than his skull is trapped between my thighs, his hair caught between my jelly cheeks.' p.65

'Pendulous, you added with a smile that became our laughter when you asked me if I always saw my labia in the objects I own.' p.76

'Two other nails I have kept include the one from your big toe. Its deep maroon reminds me of the Rothko chapel and the Victoria plums begging to be plucked from the branches draped over the Tottenham canal. I thought it was a hawk moth, the day you left it on the rug. I lowered my hand with so much care to the floor. I waited for it to flap.' p.91

'I feel astonished that this solid thing that can neither move of its own volition, nor speak to me of misery and despair, can burrow so deeply into my mind that it reaches what must surely be my soul.' p.114

'Things I live with use their stillness to goad me. The glossy white toilet is so resolutely immobile, I've developed the urge to wrench it from the floor and shove it out of place.' p.115-116

[cycads and ferns · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I asked her if she really believed that a wafer and a cup of wine could be the flesh and blood of Christ.
I do, she said, and I envied her certainty.
Isn’t that a form of cannibalism? I said.
She laughed. She told me about a conversation she’d had with a priest, some years back. He had advised her to think through transubstantiation with bullets. Whereas Anglicans are content to fire blanks, he’d explained, Catholics use live ammunition.”

It starts with a toaster, goes onto a timer and a dead squirrel. The objects that we own and collect may have a previous existence or remind us of other things, many times ghastly things.
My neighbor planted an eastern sweetshrub, Calycanthus floridus, in her yard, remembering this shrub from her childhood growing up in the mountains of West Virginia. I smelled the fruity scent of the flowers and I planted one too. Later I looked up the native habitat of this shrub and read about mountaintop mining and the effects to flora and fauna and the humans living near the Appalachian Mountains.

“Those gloves. Why do I assume they are for women’s hands? Is this why I bristle at the fluffy yellow dusters, too, and the can of Mr Sheen? I have seen many things in my life. I have seen a Harris hawk swoop on a magpie….and I have read, in my own inbox, the rage of the readers of the Daily Mail. I have driven through the smoke of a forest fire….But I have never seen a man shaking Mr Sheen or taking a yellow cloth to a bookshelf or a bannister or a mantle above a fire.”

[Marc Nash · Rating 5 out of 5]

Video review https://youtu.be/CrU3no080lg

[Owen Hatherley · Rating 4 out of 5]

As in the earlier This is the Place to Be* Pawson puts some of the same things into the mix as a lot of current fashionable people (some memoir, some history, some aesthetics, some things from books recently read, the motif of a quite nice London life being ambushed by all the appalling things happening everywhere) but her strange short books couldn't resemble less the current polite style: instead this is pulverising, bizarre, relentless, and often extremely funny in a scatalogical, visceral fashion. One of the most original, powerful and unusual writers around.

* (I was on the jury of a book prize once and lobbied hard for this to win it, which...it didn't)

[Josephine Wajer-Busch · Rating 3 out of 5]

De pepermolen voelt als een voor mijn vuist gemaakte handgranaat. [...] Ik kan er niet naar kijken zonder dat ik mezelf het ding uit het raam op de bovenverdieping zie gooien naar een man die met een raketwerper en een mes door de straat aan komt lopen. En: Ik zet mijn kookwekker op een minuut. Ik dwing mezelf te visualiseren dat drie van mijn vrienden worden vergast. Deze passages zijn ongebruikelijk voor een roman. Toch staat Verbruikt licht er vol mee. Pawson doet geen enkele moeite om de lezer te behagen. Geen uitgewerkte personages, vrijwel geen verhaallijn.

Clusterbom
Pawson werd geboren in Londen (1986) en deed jarenlang verslag van de conflicten in Gaza, Irak en Ivoorkust. Pawson heeft met eigen ogen gezien heeft afgespeeld. De verteller in Verbruikt licht zegt:  ‘Mijn stem stokte vast en zeker, die eerste keer, maar ik keek niet weg. Mijn blik verzonk in de hel.’ We komen niet erg veel te weten over de verteller. Ze schrijft over wat zich heeft eerder heeft afgespeeld. De gebeurtenissen hebben misschien nog het meeste weg van een clusterbom. Niet alleen vanwege de enorme impact, maar ook vanwege de losse scherven die het achterlaat. Een moord, verminkingen, seksueel geweld, de onthoofding.

Trauma
De oorlog is voorbij maar de alledaagse dingen staan op scherp en herinneren aan gewelddadigheden die zich eerder hebben afgespeeld. Het doet me denken aan PTSS, de stoornis waarbij je schokkende gebeurtenissen niet goed verwerkt. En zelfs als het huis zonder spullen zou zijn klinkt volgens Pawson nog ‘de angst voor het geluid dat de verdwenen objecten oproepen’. Pawson ontleende de titel van haar boek aan een citaat van de bekende architect Louis Kahn. I sense light as the aura ‘to be to be’. Material as ‘special light’. The mountains, the streams, the atmosphere and we are of spent light.

Wie is schuldig
De verteller is niet alleen getuige van gruwelijkheden maar tegelijkertijd ook deelnemer of misschien zelfs dader. Ze bedenkt dat ze het heerlijk zou vinden om te schieten met een wapen. Ook is ze benieuwd hoe haar lichaam zou reageren op een executie. Het roept de vraag op wie er nou eigenlijk verantwoordelijk is voor de misstanden. Zijn de getuigen van vandaag de mogelijke daders van morgen? Het lezen van Pawson is een bijzondere maar ook zeer vervreemdende ervaring.

[endrju · Rating 4 out of 5]

Describing a toaster in the opening pages of the book, Pawson writes:

Above each light, fractionally off centre, a word is printed in the same restrained font found in CIA documents. Together, they form a synopsis of the anthropocene: REHEAT DEFROST CANCEL. (3)

And indeed, it is a very Anthropocene book in that it attempts to show the thickly intertwined materialities and histories of what constitutes our everyday existence: the objects we surround ourselves with for all sorts of reasons, ranging from sustaining our life forms to purely decorative purposes. All are implicated in extractive practices that are destructive to both non-human and human beings racialized as non-white and made objects of colonial exploitation.

Walking along that lane, I tried to remember the name of the town in southern Congo, the one where toddlers cut cobalt from rock, where exposure to toxic heavy metals is leading to stillbirths and foetal abnormalities, where babies are born with legs that won’t unfold and girls as young as one have been raped by men who believe that sex with a virgin will increase their chances of finding cobalt under the ground and decrease the chance of death. I tried to work out the difference between myself with my mobile phone and the millions of men who, in their desperate attempts to be sexually aroused, pay to download images of children being abused. (101)

A cell phone and a plethora of household appliances, such as the aforementioned toaster, become what certain corners of science and technology studies call "thick objects," objects that reveal the scale of the planetary processes that have made them materially possible and present. Pawson goes a bit further and relates all of this to the most personal and bodily through various bodily processes and orifices, and that's what makes this book fascinating to me. We can't even go to the toilet without being in the thick of it - from the production and disposal of waste to the use of a range of products and objects in the process. The sheer number of relationships and scales is dizzying, but Pawson does a very good job of making it readable.

[Marie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Een praaachtige denkflarden chaos!!!

“Het was door haar dat ik ten slotte inzag dat het geweld dat door Europeanen binnen Europa wordt gepleegd zijn wortels heeft in het geweld dat door Europeanen buiten Europa is gepleegd, maar waarom zouden deze gedachten me invallen terwijl ik in de keuken sta te kijken naar de plek die werd ingenomen door het portret van een kokette kut?”

[Nicola]

I was intrigued by the brief mention of this in Guardian books. The objects we use are interesting in all sorts of different ways, and this book is a sort of internal monologue as the writer goes about her daily business. The objects she uses, from the cooker to a wedgewood pot, elicit random thoughts. This touched a nerve in me -- I can rarely run a bath without thinking of people who don't have any clean water, never mind the hot running stuff. This author's thoughts are much wilder than that, no doubt influenced by her former career as a war reporter in some pretty dire settings and I suspect either a desire to shock or a disequilibrium arising from some dreadful sights seen as a war reporter. Sometimes the violence of those thoughts felt gratuitous to me, and I can see the author has been the object of virulent criticism, which doesn't always seem warranted by the content (e.g. the comments on a Guardian piece she wrote about marriage, which I found mildly interesting and unexceptionable but attracted almost universal flaming). I suspect this book might have a narrow appeal, but I found it thought-provoking. It's come back to me several times in reading about other topics, such as the enormous number of objects in the British Museum and the (slightly crazy) attempt to catalogue them, Lara Maiklem's book about River Thames mudlarking and the history of those found objects (review elsewhere), the apparent current mania for de-cluttering (that one's passed me by) and an interesting Guardian long read about the role of the body and physical objects in our thinking, by Christine Rosen, that quotes Baggini: “Knowing where things come from, and how their makers are treated, does and should affect how we feel about them.” Incidentally, the same article discusses how we write - by hand or (like this piece) typed: as the Chinese apparently say, tibiwangzi, which means “take pen, forget character”. I was sometimes infuriated by the writing, some of which felt like it belonged to a personal diary that should stay personal, but there is an extended stream of consciousness about the front door handle from the ironmongers and all the other materials and objects categorised in little wooden drawers, that felt like a micro version of a late chapter of Orbiting, about the busyness of the earth below the space capsule. It can often sound pretentious but for me, had interesting resonances with other works about materiality: I happened to see the film Architecton, about concrete and buildings bombed and ruined, which also had echoes in this book. So definitely curate's eggish.

[Bart Van Thuyne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Heel bijzonder! Aan de hand van vertrouwde objecten van de hoofdpersoon worden associaties gemaakt die soms grappig, maar ook verontrustend en gruwelijk zijn. Het verleden van de schrijver als oorlogscorrespondent is tastbaar. Ze laat de mens zien als een irrationeel wezen, capabel tot het begaan van de grootste wreedheden.

[Chloe J · Rating 1 out of 5]

Thinks it’s subversive but is actually just weird and boring

[Greg S · Rating 5 out of 5]

A scrapbook, a collage of a woman’s life told through the objects she has surrounded herself with. A timer on the fridge send her thoughts towards hand grenades used during the Troubles, her mobile phone makes her think about the abuse of cobalt miners in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, her toilet recalls memories of past meals as well as aborted foetuses.

But there’s also a lot of humour here too. It’s hard to predict where each object will lead her thoughts; sentences take unexpected turns that sometimes made me laugh out loud.

On the fridge in her kitchen:
“that middle-aged woman from Kent - the one you invited for lunch in the summer, who’d damaged her hip picking up a box of Bran Flakes with her teeth - well, she compared this particular white good to a hotel mini-bar while boasting that her cocaine habit had absolutely no bearing on the deaths of children in Colombia.”

[Liselot · Rating 2 out of 5]

korte stukjes broodrooster die mij niet echt een duidelijk beeld geven band e hoofdpersoon. ik was de draad kwijt en niet op een inspirerende manier

[Rony]

Niet mijn ding, te hobbelig, opgegeven na 62 bladzijden.

[Aidan · Rating 4 out of 5]

i'm still mulling over my response to this book, but it definitely climbed inside my head a bit. at first the apparently offhand references to genocides, sandwiched between descriptions of egg timers and lampshades, seemed gratuitous and a bit offensive, but less so as the book went on and i got to know her style (and i think as i relaxed about her politics). ultimately it’s a very personal book so many of the things i’d normally think about don’t really apply — i don’t think there are many ‘should’s about something that’s such an act of self-expression — but i really enjoyed her writing style and will definitely be thinking about this for a while to come. recommended for people who enjoyed (the form of) the argonauts by maggie nelson

[Imre Bertelsen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Meer nog dan dat Lara Pawson het kwaad vertegenwoordigd ziet in de voorwerpen om haar heen, ziet zij die voorwerpen stille getuigen, even schuldig aan al het leed in de wereld als welk persoon dan ook.

Dit is een van de boeken waar ik graqg met de schrijver ervan zou willen praten over hoe het tot stand is gekomen. Het moet haast wel of Pawsons ervaringen als oorlogsverslaggever hebben invloed gehad op de thematiek. Het is niet zozeer dat ze het kwaad als onderwerp an sich beschouwt, maar het wordt juist altijd tegenover het vredige, het huiselijke gezet, waardoor het kwaad er nog meer bovenuit steekt.

Zo wordt een lieflijk tafereel van een buurvrouw die katjes uit de buurt verwelkomt en ze laat nestelen in een deken in haar wasmachine opeens verdraaid tot een horrorscene als die buurvrouw ieder jaar de wasmachine aanzet, met de katjes er nog in.

De stroom aan overpeinzingen en soms shockerende scenes hadden even nodig om me te overtuigen. Stilistisch vond ik het begin van het boek wisselvallig en dit is wel een boek dat vrijwel volledig op stijl leunt, plot en personages zijn er immers niet.

Gaandeweg, als je langer in het hoofd van de verteller zit, begint zich een bijzondere verzameling aan geweld en pijn te vormen. De schrijver weet veel te zeggen over de spullen om haar heen, maar ook genoeg om de mensen die deze spullen gebruiken.

De verteller probeert als het ware haar perverse kant naar boven te halen, puur om er achter te komen hoe die kant van haar eruit ziet. Hoe zal zij reageren als ze een publiekelijke executie bijwoont, hoe is het om te worden gewaterboard? Het lijkt alsof ze diep wil afdalen in zichzelf om in de buurt te komen van anderen, die ze niet begrijpt.

Ondanks al het geweld gaan mensen door met leven en hopen tegen beter weten in. Toeschouwers van het meest wrede toneelstuk dat er is verwachten nog steeds een goed einde. Zo ook de verteller zelf, die memoreert over de Holocaust, slavernij en verkrachtingen bij Kobaltmijnen, maar net zo goed bezig is met haar servies, haar hondenharen verzamelen voor breiwerkjes en op de koffie gaan bij oude buren.

Het kan niet anders, dacht ik bij het lezen. De verteller is uitgesproken jaloers op het niet-weten van voorwerpen en weet dat ze haar geheugen niet zal kunnen uitwissen, maar ze kan nog wel haar ervaringen en kennis inzetten voor iets goed. Of dat tegen beter weten in is, dat doet er misschien helemaal niet toe.

“Jij zei dat het voelde alsof we het eind van een stuk touw hadden vastgehouden dat zich over honderden jaren en duizenden kilometers uitstrekte naar iets verschrikkelijks, iets door en door afschuwelijks, vergelijkbaar met het moment waarop tot je doordringt dat de tatoeage op de arm van je buurman een nummer is en je in die vlijmscherpe seconden een glimp opvangt van de verschrikkingen die hij heeft overleefd.”

[Patrick Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Objects around the house trigger associations and memories that bring the horrors of life around the world into the domestic, in this weird, short, cool-and-yet-warm book that goes where it wants and then stops when it stops. The author's previous book pulled away kind of abruptly in the same way, which made me wonder what precisely the overall goal had been, as I did again with this one. But that kind of play with form and significance is a vital and challenging thing in both books. It's also not a sentimental liberal book as such, taking a deeper slant on atrocity and corruption around the world than, say, you might get in literary novels about middle class outrage about right wing populism. Reminded me more of Sebald in the breadth of its sense of the darkness of history. It's much livelier company than that implies though.

[Leen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Als liefhebber van associatieve, fragmentarische, autofictie romans - vind ik dit een absolute knaller.
Het persoonlijke wordt hier op prachtige wijze met het universele en wereldse (zeg ik dat zo?) verbonden.

[Cathérine · Rating 4 out of 5]

4,5 ⭐

[Allie Oliver · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5.

Curious little book that lingers on in you. Simultaneously cold and alien and the most intimate thing you'll ever read. To me, it speaks to the inherent unknowability of people, even those closest to us, mirrored through the objects in our homes, which have had whole lives, journeys, histories, remote and strange before they found themselves to us. Big fan of all the descriptions of the dick and vagina as seen from the POV of the toilet bowl.

[Alex Ploeger · Rating 3 out of 5]

Schommelend tussen 3 en 4. Af en toe heel goed, af en toe de draad kwijt.

[Matthias · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 gewoon niet mijn type boek wel goed geschreven geen discussie daaromtrent

[Lena Put · Rating 2 out of 5]

meh niet zoveel samenhang

[Chris Bissette]

What a strange book this is. The back cover copy tells me that this is fiction, but also memoir and history, and it's somehow all three of those things at once. Her website says this about it:

It is a hybrid text combining fiction, history and memoir. You might call it a work of prose fiction. You might call it a prose poem. You could just call it a book.

It doesn't have any of the hallmarks of what we would normally describe as a novel, even by the loose definition that literary fiction sometimes takes - there are no characters to speak of other than the narrator, no plot, no dialogue, no real forward motion or sense of 'things happening'. And yet to be a memoir or be a history book it should probably tell us some concrete things about the author or a period in time, and it doesn't really do that either. (It does reveal a lot about the narrator, but whether that narrator is actually the author is entirely unclear.)

This is a very fragmented reflection on what it means to be alive, human, wman, sexual, white, (probably) middle class, to own things, to exist under capitalism. The structure is very simple - the narrator is given or observes an item in her life, and this sparks a series of reflections about events from her past. These often delve into the most mundane, base elements of human existence - there are multiple relfections on the act of taking a shit, for example - juxtaposed with thoughts about torture, rape, and war crimes.

It's complex and strange and defies categorisation while feeling very honest and vulnerable. I won't say I enjoyed it but I definitely liked it, and I see why it's up for the Goldsmiths Prize. This is one I'll be thinking about for a while

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's the gratitude that comes from the knowledge that, here I am, walking around with a tiny piece of Congo in my hand, as if it could make up for all the Englishness I loathe. Here I am with my mobile phone calling you to tell you that I've just been eating wild blackberries the size of plums beside the Kingsmill factory ..... that the dog just caught a young, violet pigeon and l'd had to finish it off with my own hands in front of a male cyclist who seemed unfamiliar with death ...... that I'm not sure for how much longer I can continue to avoid flying because I'm missing certain people so much my heart aches, that I'm sorry I got cross about the ladder to the attic and, yes, you're right, it doesn't matter anyway, that this is just a message to remind you to rub some of that Elizabeth Arden Eight Hour Cream my mother gave us for the dog's paws into your elbow

Shortlisted for the 2024 Goldsmiths Prize.

It is written by a former BBC World Service journalist whose non-fiction “In the Name of the People” about an Angolan massacre was Orwell Prize longlisted in 2015, and whose memoir “The Place To Be” was Gordon Prize shortlisted. It is her first novel and while as its back cover categorisation of fiction/memoir/history might suggest it does draw on some of her journalist experiences and on her kaleidoscopic examination of memory, it also very deliberately on her behalf resisted bookworld lead entreaties to cash in by writing more Africa investigative based non-fiction or memoirs and even within the world of fiction stands as memorably distinctive.

It published by the wonderful one man publisher CB Editions – no less than their third Goldsmith shortlisting.

Returning to the book:

Graham Greene is quoted as saying “For those who began to write at the end of the 1920s or the beginning of the 30s, there were two great inescapable influences: Proust and Freud, who are mutually complementary.” (1)

And from reading this book – I would say that for those writing at the cutting edge of fiction some one hundred years later, Proust and Freud remain influences but so does 100 years of the Anthropocene (with its impact on climate), capitalism and colonialism at their most rapacious and violence both in society and a century of global conflict.

Proust supposedly did not go with a madeleine as the sensory trigger to unlock his narrator’s memories but instead (in a 1907 first draft) toast (2)

A first draft of Proust’s monumental novel dating from 1907 had the author reminiscing not about madeleines as the sensory trigger for a childhood memory about his aunt, but instead about toasted bread mixed with honey.

But to then move from toast to toaster (subject to object one might say) even more pertinent is a story about the author Sheila Heti as recounted (both in writing and in a book event Lara Pawson attended) by the experimental author Joanna Walsh – Heti responding to a criticism of her writing (and implicitly much female writing) for being too autofictional said “People who look at themselves in order to better look at the world — that is not narcissism. It is, and has always been, what people who make art do, and must do. You cannot do it blind. You cannot do it by looking at a toaster.”

Because here we have a book written in first person by a female narrator living in London immediately post lockdowns and addressed to a “you” her unnamed (I think) male life partner – but one which draws on objects within her own four walls (deliberately – by Pawson to meet Heti’s challenge - starting with a toaster given to her by a newly widowered neighbour) to explore those themes I set out above and much more.

So for example from the very toaster we get in a quick series of association over a remarkable couple of pages observations from the narrator on: ladies of a certain age/class/period, rat dropping, the anatomy of her dog and humans, personal sexual references, terrorism, plastic pollution, period poverty, Arabic bread riots, her own foreign trips, extreme violence against women and even a reflection on what must have happened to make someone enact this violence.

The chair of judges on this year’s Goldsmith Prize said that this book’s on this year’s shortlist “ask uncomfortable questions while nonetheless finding exuberance and joy in a form that makes such questioning both possible and pleasurable: the novel at its most novel” – and I think this is particularly true of this novel. For it continues from its opening on the same often sexually charged (but only reflecting internal thoughts) and often violent (but only reflecting the pervasive violence of our geo-political system and society) household inspired but often complex non-sequitur laden path.

To quote another judge Sara Baume “It is impossible to predict, at the beginning of almost every paragraph … where it will have taken the reader by the end." but (my words) what you can predict is that both journey and destination are often challenging (including Gaza, IRA bombmakers and the Holocaust) and intimate.

As an aside the sections on the skinning and consumption of squirrels were at least lightened for me by the canine procurement method and I heavily identified with the use of a military style electronic device to deter deer chasing.

To mirror the book’s wonderful opening pages the book has one other standout section – when the accidental destruction of a burner phone prompts three pages of at times almost transcendental prose when the narrator lists things she has called to tell “you”.

Overall I think this is an excellent addition to the longlist.

Sources:

(1) https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/20...
(2) https://amp.theguardian.com/books/201...
(3) https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/b...

[Hana White · Rating 5 out of 5]

yow.

[Joseph Schreiber · Rating 5 out of 5]

I adored Lara Pawson's This Is the Place to Be which falls more neatly, if unconventionally into the category of memoir—a blend of self-observations, memories, and the detailed experience of life as a war correspondent in Angola. Spent Light may seem similar, but it is not only stranger, but it blurs the history and memories with fiction. It presents itself a monologue by a woman who contemplates household objects, belongings, her intimate body, nature and the banality of everyday violence, while weaving a web that stretches out into a world of calculated and horrific cruelty—a world of slavery, colonial exploitation and war. Throughout, she is addressing her partner, in a direct, conversational way that allows her to eschew unnecessary background and detail, and yet invite the reader into her life, their lives, in a manner that is sometimes almost too close for comfort. Which is, of course, the point. This is a book that is uncomfortable, sometimes shocking, and yet shot through with the love and compassion that connects the narrator to her partner, her pet and the people around her. A compulsively easy book to read, but one that sits uneasily, strangely and wonderfully in a light of its own making.
An expanded review can be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2024/03/15/i-...

[chester · Rating 4 out of 5]

i sense neurodivergence in Mx Pawson. but that may just be wishful thinking? (one of us!)

she’s… the first word that comes to mind is “brave”, but it’s not that exactly. it’s more that she’s unencumbered by unnecessary propriety. she doesn’t leave anything out, which is not the same as tossing everything in. the book is never gratuitous; nor is it worried about offending your sensibilities.

the writing is terrific. the stream-of-contemplation is cohesive but not repetitive. people come and go and come back again. sometimes much later. or not at all. this could have been a single paragraph, but it isn't. thank god for that. (and not just paragraphs, but sections! no chapters necessary; none used.)

i am curious to read Mx Pawson's previous book, "This Is the Place to Be", also published by CB editions. also a slip of a thing at 136 pages.

[Macushla · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely loved this book, and felt very ‘seen’ by the writing style as this feels exactly how my mind works - jumping and spiralling to different memories or ideas from nostalgic to horrific to banal. I sped through it because this felt like it fit with the flow of the writing and steam of consciousness type structure, but I also know that in doing this I have missed previous details. This book was so rich with ideas, feelings and images and it felt indulgent at the same time as easy to read. I absolutely love the idea of showing snapshots of a woman’s life through objects, and think this so accurately conveyed the complexities, the nuance, and the contradictions of life, love and relationships. The hints of the woman’s relationship with her partner were really beautiful and gradually built a picture of a loving, joyful relationship (which I was so happy about because initially I expected a portrait of an unhappy or dissatisfying relationship). The interlinking and intersections of objects, stories, people and places felt very systemic to me, and I wondered how this style could be adapted in a therapeutic sense - story of my life in objects, what objects spark joy (or stories??). Really enjoyed and will definitely re-read!