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58 Facets: On law, violence and revolution
When you have been forcibly displaced from your home, the revolutionary dream of what should have happened … stays alive as a utopian beacon of happiness that will (possibly) never come to pass. To be content and make a meaningful life from the ruins of that wrenching and uprooting is a small, everyday miracle that others easily overlook.
58 Facets is like a beautifully cut jewel, the kind Marika Sosnowski’s grandfather would have bought, cut and sold after he arrived in Melbourne in 1947, having passed through a checkpoint minutes ahead of Nazi occupiers, via a Japanese internment camp in Java and a migrant accommodation camp just outside of Brisbane. If you hold it up to the light you will catch different stories in each of its many facets. You will have the table, the bezel, the star and the upper girdle, the lower girdle, the pavilion and the culet. You will have the dreams, the checkpoints, the documents, the bribes, the camps, the occupation and the resistance.
Part memoir, part exposé, 58 Facets weaves together the narratives of Holocaust survivors and Israeli war criminals with Syrian activists, revolutionaries and dissenters. It challenges us to go beyond the links we see in our lives to our felt experiences of the law, violence and revolution, and how these experiences travel across bodies, space and time.
58 Facets is like a beautifully cut jewel, the kind Marika Sosnowski’s grandfather would have bought, cut and sold after he arrived in Melbourne in 1947, having passed through a checkpoint minutes ahead of Nazi occupiers, via a Japanese internment camp in Java and a migrant accommodation camp just outside of Brisbane. If you hold it up to the light you will catch different stories in each of its many facets. You will have the table, the bezel, the star and the upper girdle, the lower girdle, the pavilion and the culet. You will have the dreams, the checkpoints, the documents, the bribes, the camps, the occupation and the resistance.
Part memoir, part exposé, 58 Facets weaves together the narratives of Holocaust survivors and Israeli war criminals with Syrian activists, revolutionaries and dissenters. It challenges us to go beyond the links we see in our lives to our felt experiences of the law, violence and revolution, and how these experiences travel across bodies, space and time.
- GenresNonfictionPolitics
187 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 16, 2025
9 people are currently reading
120 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
May 6, 2026
A hard book to review or rate. It meanders all over the place, sometimes repetitive, sometimes quoting poets, sometimes dropping some horrific facts but mostly just letting the reader make up their mind where they stand. It’s about the law, checkpoints, camps, violence, refugees, the authors fear of flying and intergenerational trauma and the connections between it all.
October 28, 2025
Profound, wandering, wondering. The journey took the long road at times but I mostly enjoyed the process. A vulnerable read with some core themes that I’ll chew on for a little longer. Brava MS
April 15, 2026
I really wanted to rate/like this more.
Kept swinging between occasionally loving it and finding it brilliant then…not… and back again.
Maybe I’m just used to more radical and explicit revolutionary or abolitionist authors, but this seemed kind of… hollow?
Set out essay-style but does not follow an organised thesis. Rather best read as a kind of free form poetry I think? Really feels like it’s -trying- to be a political essay (on revolution, inter-generational trauma and how law can function oppressively), but ends up saying nothing much.
Peters off into several chapters talking about how the author finds flying on planes scary…
Conclusion’ demonstrates how exceptionally underwhelming the meat of this book is.
Self-described (about 1/3 way through) as ‘not a person who is inclined to take a firm position, choose a side, argue the point.’ …someone ‘neutral or quixotic’. and yes: this author doesn’t appear to have any real opinion or thing to say — Not clear why they wrote this book.
Nonetheless! Decent prose, interesting use of anecdotes from their own family history and some friends’ stories, and borrowed quotes and ideas from greater thinkers.
Author writes beautifully! And seems likeable. But what was her point.
Kept swinging between occasionally loving it and finding it brilliant then…not… and back again.
Maybe I’m just used to more radical and explicit revolutionary or abolitionist authors, but this seemed kind of… hollow?
Set out essay-style but does not follow an organised thesis. Rather best read as a kind of free form poetry I think? Really feels like it’s -trying- to be a political essay (on revolution, inter-generational trauma and how law can function oppressively), but ends up saying nothing much.
Peters off into several chapters talking about how the author finds flying on planes scary…
Conclusion’ demonstrates how exceptionally underwhelming the meat of this book is.
Self-described (about 1/3 way through) as ‘not a person who is inclined to take a firm position, choose a side, argue the point.’ …someone ‘neutral or quixotic’. and yes: this author doesn’t appear to have any real opinion or thing to say — Not clear why they wrote this book.
Nonetheless! Decent prose, interesting use of anecdotes from their own family history and some friends’ stories, and borrowed quotes and ideas from greater thinkers.
Author writes beautifully! And seems likeable. But what was her point.
Read
November 4, 2025Marika Sosnowski's 58 Facets explores the links between the law and violence.
Sosnowski begins by telling the story of her great-grandmother, who paid a bribe to the guards at the French/Spanish border during WWII, securing a passage to safety for herself and her descendants.
Arriving eventually in the Dutch East Indies, a place to which Dutch citizens could travel "without much difficulty" in 1940, Sosnowski's family were imprisoned two years later when the Japanese invaded, and spent three years starving in an internment camp in Java.
From there, Sosnowski zooms out to examine how the law and violence affect people in myriad and often difficult to categorise ways. Each chapter is short and diamond-sharp.
The writing is intellectually scrupulous and canny. Describing a great-uncle who fought for the Haganah, an early Zionist military organisation and precursor to the Israel Defense Forces, Sosnowski writes: "The Haganah went on to ethnically cleanse Palestine in 1947-?."
That question mark is one that hangs over much of the book. Confronting the violent realities of conflict, exile and migration, from Europe under the Nazis to Syrians displaced by the civil war and Assad's regime, Sosnowski looks at some of the most intractable problems of our time. She does not pretend to have answers.
Sosnowski's ability to link dramatic and life-changing situations and experiences with more mundane moments is part of what makes her book so compassionate.
Read on:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-2...
Sosnowski begins by telling the story of her great-grandmother, who paid a bribe to the guards at the French/Spanish border during WWII, securing a passage to safety for herself and her descendants.
Arriving eventually in the Dutch East Indies, a place to which Dutch citizens could travel "without much difficulty" in 1940, Sosnowski's family were imprisoned two years later when the Japanese invaded, and spent three years starving in an internment camp in Java.
From there, Sosnowski zooms out to examine how the law and violence affect people in myriad and often difficult to categorise ways. Each chapter is short and diamond-sharp.
The writing is intellectually scrupulous and canny. Describing a great-uncle who fought for the Haganah, an early Zionist military organisation and precursor to the Israel Defense Forces, Sosnowski writes: "The Haganah went on to ethnically cleanse Palestine in 1947-?."
That question mark is one that hangs over much of the book. Confronting the violent realities of conflict, exile and migration, from Europe under the Nazis to Syrians displaced by the civil war and Assad's regime, Sosnowski looks at some of the most intractable problems of our time. She does not pretend to have answers.
Sosnowski's ability to link dramatic and life-changing situations and experiences with more mundane moments is part of what makes her book so compassionate.
Read on:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-2...
April 13, 2026
Really nice piece! Interesting mix of essay, biography, and general musing, I liked the discursive style a lot. Sosnowski is clearly super smart and super caring.
The way she weaves back and forward between stories of holocaust, Syria, and Gaza really demonstrates the nuance with which one can approach critique of the state of Israel as it exists and acts today while being empathetic to historic persecution of Jewish people. The way Sosnowski sketches the behaviour of authoritarian power likely intentionally maps on to the way the debate around the genocide in Gaza is soft-censored (and increasingly hard-censored, a la Queensland) in Australia today by an intentional conflation of pro-Palestinian sentiment with antisemitic ideals by large segments of the media and political class.
I found it slightly toooo meandering and recursive, maybe I came into it expecting a slightly more essay style piece rather than the reflective exercise Sosnowski is presenting. I also think I'm probably not the target audience given that I'm already sympathetic to the same politics as her, and maybe the gentle reinforcement of the same few ideas, the pathos of her archiving of individual experiences, would have more impact on someone less engaged with the connections between the different facets of Sosnowski's tour through law, violence, and revolution.
I think I felt about the novel the same way Sosnowski felt about a panel she attended:
"The responses... were, as expected, well informed and eloquent. I don't remember anything particularly poignant being said. Nevertheless, I came away with a certain sense of power and dignity."
Good book! Lovely nuance and reflectivity, full of empathy and quiet revolution!
The way she weaves back and forward between stories of holocaust, Syria, and Gaza really demonstrates the nuance with which one can approach critique of the state of Israel as it exists and acts today while being empathetic to historic persecution of Jewish people. The way Sosnowski sketches the behaviour of authoritarian power likely intentionally maps on to the way the debate around the genocide in Gaza is soft-censored (and increasingly hard-censored, a la Queensland) in Australia today by an intentional conflation of pro-Palestinian sentiment with antisemitic ideals by large segments of the media and political class.
I found it slightly toooo meandering and recursive, maybe I came into it expecting a slightly more essay style piece rather than the reflective exercise Sosnowski is presenting. I also think I'm probably not the target audience given that I'm already sympathetic to the same politics as her, and maybe the gentle reinforcement of the same few ideas, the pathos of her archiving of individual experiences, would have more impact on someone less engaged with the connections between the different facets of Sosnowski's tour through law, violence, and revolution.
I think I felt about the novel the same way Sosnowski felt about a panel she attended:
"The responses... were, as expected, well informed and eloquent. I don't remember anything particularly poignant being said. Nevertheless, I came away with a certain sense of power and dignity."
Good book! Lovely nuance and reflectivity, full of empathy and quiet revolution!
April 26, 2026
This one was patchy for me. I appreciated the prompt to think, particularly in the sections about bureaucracy and the social contract. Some points were a bit laboured (eg checkpoints) and others were a bit tenuous (eg aeroplanes as camps… I guess… a bit?). There’s for sure some brilliance here but I’m not sure it quite comes together as a whole. 3.5 stars
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews