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Life
108 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2017
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 24, 2018
From reading Black’s collection of essays Dark Pool Party, it is evident that she is uniquely skilled at twisting a narrative. She is proficient at calibrating each paragraph with layer after layer of events and references, naming the names and self-observing with clinical accuracy. Narratives that read the reader.
In this novella, Black does just that with the help of artist and writer Juliana Huxtable. The larger plot of the book serpentines around a lost-or-is-it romance between Black and Huxtable, ex-colleagues at a transnational catastrophic risk-analysis firm. Disillusioned with the job, Black moved to Berlin and retired, only to be brought back by an email from Huxtable letting her know that it was time, the purest and most concentrated risk-assessment gig had arrived: the apocalypse.
Huxtable and Black weaved this plot in epistolary fashion and embroidered with infinitely amusing musings about a wide spectrum of subjects: “science as mysticism” when in service of risk-analysis; the ethics of eating cockroaches, our successors on Earth; the communion with the “human race” when aboard public transit; the ruthlessness of disaster capitalism, and above all, the longing of a love that faces the end of the world and can only see the absent lover’s face.
The book is littered with perfect quotes like: “As if history were a sediment on the bank of a polluted river”, or “[l]iving now seems mostly a blank form waiting for conditions”, or “[a] panic attack is the body’s way of telling you you don’t know your heart”; they are everywhere like golden coins in a videogame, delivered with a pace and attitude that is exciting, and staggering at times. Huxtable and Black wrote entrancing prose and wholly evocative moments —like a soft-villain's earache during a turbulent landing—, a new and protean, hot-blooded love letter from the edge of the volcano of our present.
In this novella, Black does just that with the help of artist and writer Juliana Huxtable. The larger plot of the book serpentines around a lost-or-is-it romance between Black and Huxtable, ex-colleagues at a transnational catastrophic risk-analysis firm. Disillusioned with the job, Black moved to Berlin and retired, only to be brought back by an email from Huxtable letting her know that it was time, the purest and most concentrated risk-assessment gig had arrived: the apocalypse.
Huxtable and Black weaved this plot in epistolary fashion and embroidered with infinitely amusing musings about a wide spectrum of subjects: “science as mysticism” when in service of risk-analysis; the ethics of eating cockroaches, our successors on Earth; the communion with the “human race” when aboard public transit; the ruthlessness of disaster capitalism, and above all, the longing of a love that faces the end of the world and can only see the absent lover’s face.
The book is littered with perfect quotes like: “As if history were a sediment on the bank of a polluted river”, or “[l]iving now seems mostly a blank form waiting for conditions”, or “[a] panic attack is the body’s way of telling you you don’t know your heart”; they are everywhere like golden coins in a videogame, delivered with a pace and attitude that is exciting, and staggering at times. Huxtable and Black wrote entrancing prose and wholly evocative moments —like a soft-villain's earache during a turbulent landing—, a new and protean, hot-blooded love letter from the edge of the volcano of our present.
July 25, 2017
the ambience of this was intense. I wished it were longer?
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews