Tice Cin’s philosophical and poetic new novel about a young Turkish-Cypriot songwriter and music producer extends the preoccupations of her prizewinning debut, 2021’s Keeping the House. This intimately told sophomore novel, again a story of friendship, precarity and community, is at once an elegy, a spoken-word poem and a journalistic meditation, repeatedly asking readers: “So, are you listening?”

For our unnamed narrator, “hurts come in different shapes each time”: from the childhood scars of her father’s abandonment, to sexism in the creative scene and the difficulties of navigating short-lived flatshares on universal credit (“If you don’t know about being money dry, if you don’t know loss – you don’t get it. If you know, you know”). Her journey of personal discovery is mapped on to the contemporary travails of London’s wider working-class inner-city diaspora communities as she calculates her life by doorways, “walking past each one” without a roadmap for her personal and professional goals.

At the centre of the novel is the loss of the narrator’s closest confidante, referred to as “My Favourite Person”. As his untimely death becomes fodder for gossip, she addresses those questioning how he died: “You’re asking for information but to me it’s the loop, the scaffolding, never comes down, this con of process, all dying to know how he died.” Meanwhile, she remembers their late-night phone calls, continues to leave him unheard voicemails: “Don’t want to do it all without you on my team.”

How to survive in a world darkened by an unshakeable loss? “Memories are a bit like a messy laundry cupboard. Whenever you brush past the door, all the items inside are falling out… Jamming the door doesn’t help because everything is still messy inside.” Through love affairs and short-term jobs, in DJ booths or on dancefloors of local raves, in therapy sessions and beauty parlours, the grieving narrator attempts to articulate herself creatively and emotionally. “Sometimes my head feels like the city, ambulances going past 24/7 but we still hear nothing. In a way it’s a type of growth, to feel the wrong things less.”

In Cin’s dexterous hands, form meets content to kaleidoscopic effect. Told in the first person and without character names, most vignettes are additionally prefaced with a clarification of who is being addressed, or doing the addressing: “The ‘you’ is reading me. The ‘me’ is still me.” “The ‘she’ is all of us, me.” “I am ‘her’ and ‘you’.” With a protagonist deep in the world of music, these shape-shifting perspectives give the impression of a DJ spinning tracks.

In the narrator’s own safe space, she is “a marshmallow gravity genie who sleeps facefront on a soft cloud”, floating away from earthly human concerns. This is a tender novel looking for a foothold in an alienating world.

Singapore is paying its citizens to pick up a book for at least 15 minutes a day in an effort to fight the rise of doomscrolling.

The affluent city-state hopes its gamification strategy, which launched this month, will improve concentration, critical thinking and the imagination of Singaporeans.

Under the scheme, readers accrue points that can be redeemed for a few cents. People will have to log 50 daily reading sessions on a government website to earn S$1 (80c). A session of 15 minutes or more is rewarded with 20 virtual coins, with 1,000 coins needed for a dollar payment. One reading session is allowed daily.

The national library board’s chief, Melissa Tam, said sustainable reading habits were built through small and achievable steps.

“We live in a world of extraordinary abundance, of content, information and stimulation,” she told the Straits Times. “At any moment, we can scroll through hundreds of headlines, watch a video or get a summary of almost anything.

“We know that habits are built through small, consistent actions. So, we are starting with a simple goal: just read for 15 minutes a day. On the bus, before bed or over lunch.”

The government is considering ways to make social media less harmful for young Singaporeans, including a daily time limit. Doomscrolling and addiction caused most harm to young people, a recent study found.

It is not uncommon for the Singapore government to use financial incentives to try to influence the behaviour of its citizens. Previous health-focused initiatives have included supermarket vouchers for walking and prizes for hitting daily step targets.

Despite government concerns about reading, Singapore’s 15-year-old students recently topped the world rankings for reading in the 2025 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), beating China and Taiwan.

The most interesting chapter in Anthony Scaramucci’s All the Wrong Moves is the one where the hedge funder turned podcaster goes to work for Donald Trump. It’s summer 2017, and he’s been given the job of comms director, which he doesn’t know how to do, but he and Trump think it’ll work out because they’re both from New York. Or maybe he took it because he had “Potomac fever”, which afflicts Wall Street financiers who find themselves on the riverfront in Washington DC thinking they know how to run a country just because they’re “full of power and judgmental insight … about to fix everything”.

This appointment lasts only 11 days, not even enough time to be truly tainted by Trump’s first term, though it is enough time for Scaramucci to miss the birth of his son. The account is a mea culpa soup, with the author full of regrets for his hubris, his impulsivity, his “pride, egotism and asinine stupidity”, the fact that, despite the clear-sightedness bestowed by his humble beginnings, he’d come to assume the collective biases of the rich people he hung out with.

But what he doesn’t address is the fact that it was quite plain by then who Donald Trump was. Scaramucci himself identifies the beginning of Trump’s explicit use of racism and the politics of hatred, not in his first taboo-breaking statement that Mexicans were bringing drugs and rapists into the US (2015), but with the Obama birther conspiracy, which had been going on for years. Irrespective of all his pondering as to whether Trump was symptom or cause of a broken US, Scaramucci knew when he joined the White House that he was reporting to a racist, a chancer, an egomaniac and a liar. Bluntly, a person with decent values would not have joined this administration.

That doesn’t invalidate his analysis, but it does flatten it. The US is all about money, he tells us; the founding fathers were actually the investing fathers; anything not obviously a decision motivated by money is the unintended consequence of one. The very United States was “unified – by money”, because that was all Alexander Hamilton was thinking when he created a central bank. The fact that half the English-speaking world could sing the thousand other things Hamilton was thinking in a close harmony hasn’t occurred to the author, who can’t have seen the musical. It makes his potted history of the US a little brutish, and his organising principle – that the rot started to set in from Clinton onwards, when leaders lost their “moral purpose” – contradictory. If there was never any value higher than money, how can Clinton’s purpose have been any less moral than Franklin D Roosevelt’s?

All of that is just backdrop to the book’s fatal flaw. Scaramucci details the three “catastrophic” errors that have created the US’s current doldrums, and this is all wisdom he came about the hard way, through wrong moves of his own, in the board room, in the situation room, in Trump’s inner circle. These were: privileging China during the globalisation era; waging war with no corresponding tax hikes, post 9/11; and bailing out the banks.

It’s hard to disagree with any of it. If the world’s manufacturing all moves to a place where wages are lower, you correspondingly destroy the employment prospects of your own workforce. But these are arguments that were diligently made at the time; by political insurgents from the right, during the 1992 election; by protest movements on the left, in the so-called Battle of Seattle of 1999, and in anti-globalisation demonstrations around the world subsequently.

Scaramucci writes that he should have taken this more seriously, they were right, he was wrong, but never reflects on how it came to be. It turns out that without institutional muscle – peculiar for Scaramucci to tell the entire history of his nation’s economy with only the most fleeting mention of Ronald Reagan’s union-busting – mere logic and reason aren’t enough, until it’s too late. He similarly tells the story of the war in Iraq as a cashflow snafu without considering whether anti-imperialists and pacifists might have a point, sometimes, and the story of the 2008 bailouts with only the swiftest nod towards the Occupy movement which, again, was broadly correct in its analysis.

It’s consequently a book of constant catch-up, a man who thought he knew it all, slowly surrendering to more sophisticated analyses when it is too late now anyway: China no longer looks to the US for its place in global markets; American wars are no longer waged with long-term strategic aims if patchy funding streams, but impulsively; and Wall Street no longer calls the shots, techbros do. He nods towards that last reality with a suggestion at the end to break up Silicon Valley monopolies, but never thinks seriously about how far from Kansas the world has actually strayed.

It’s nevertheless quite engaging, and no more or less infuriating than it would be if, say, Alastair Campbell (Scaramucci’s UK opposite number – both coming out with hard-boiled political realism on their Rest Is Politics pods) penned an excoriating critique of the war in Iraq. But it’s hard to choke down an argument whose kernel is “sorry, guys, I just wasn’t listening” from someone still stuck on broadcast.

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This week, The New Yorker is announcing the longlists for the 2026 National Book Awards, including Young People’s Literature, Translated Literature, Poetry, Nonfiction, and Fiction. To receive book recommendations from our writers and editors, plus short reviews of recent releases, sign up for our new What We’re Reading newsletter.

“The School of Night” is the fourth volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “Morning Star” series, which the author began writing during the COVID-19 pandemic. “The novels rifle through the history of thought and culture, tracing the paths existential unknowns have carved,” Joshua Rothman wrote in a column, considering the series in January. “The School of Night,” translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken, is one of ten titles on this year’s longlist. The books on the list originally appeared in seven languages: Arabic, Chinese, French, Indonesian, Norwegian, Russian, and Spanish. Intan Paramaditha’s “Night of a Thousand Hells,” about a young woman who carries out a suicide bombing and that act’s effect on her family, is the first Indonesian translation to be honored by the National Book Awards.

Egana Djabbarova, “My Dreadful Body”
Translated from the Russian by Lisa C. Hayden
New Vessel Press

Álvaro Enrigue, “Now I Surrender”
Translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer
Riverhead Books / Penguin Random House

Karim Kattan, “Eden at Dawn”
Translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman
Restless Books

Karl Ove Knausgaard, “The School of Night”
Translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken
Penguin Press / Penguin Random House

The more power the radical rightwing nationalists of our age accrue, the greater the risk that their destructive brand of politics becomes normalised. We should not, for instance, regard it as normal that the man in charge of one of the world’s largest nuclear arsenals casually promises “a whole civilisation will die tonight”. We should not accept that history’s first trillionaire is allowed to spread racist conspiracy theories to a hitherto unimaginable extent. We should be alarmed that, here in the UK, a party tipped to lead a potential future government is trying to cruise to power in the slipstream of this international movement.

In fact, we shouldn’t just be alarmed by such developments: we should stop them and urgently repair the damage already done. But how? And what is the nature of that damage? This bold, clarifying intervention from Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor provides some of the answers. “End times fascism” is their term for a convergence of interests that can broadly be understood as a response to the climate crisis. Faced with a world coming under unprecedented strain from environmental shocks and an unequal, resource-hungry economic system, today’s reactionaries are effectively saying: bring it on.

“The most powerful people in the world are preparing for the end of the world, an end they themselves are frenetically accelerating,” Klein and Taylor write, describing a loose alliance of three principal factions rooted in US political and business elites. First are the religious fanatics who see each new disaster as a welcome sign we are entering the end of days, but find common ground with secular demagogues who promise a glorious, prosperous future on the ruins of our present. Think, for instance, of the mirage of a “New Gaza”, a property developers’ fever dream that the Trump administration – heavily influenced by Christian Zionists – claims will arise from the wreckage of Israel’s US-backed genocide.

Next are the new tech barons, who preach that only the AI “arms race”, as Klein and Taylor put it, can save humanity – even as its demand for water and electricity scorches the planet – while they themselves dream of sitting out societal breakdown in remote, fortified enclaves. Last come the political entrepreneurs who transform visions of disaster into votes by promising to turn their nations into bunkered garrison states. Migration draws most of the attention, but you can also see this logic at work in an increasingly aggressive global scramble for natural resources: “supersized prepping at the level of the nation-state”, in Klein and Taylor’s words.

This is nothing less than a revival of fascism, the authors argue – but only if we understand “fascism” as something broader and more persistent than the uniformed mass movements that once brought Europe to the brink of destruction. In their definition, it is a recurring tendency among elites that manifests when capitalism no longer works the way they would like it to, and they feel their positions are threatened. “Fascism,” write the authors, who draw on a range of theorists including Walter Benjamin and WEB Du Bois, “is capitalism with bared teeth.”

There have been endless academic disputes over whether such a broad definition of fascism is useful. Personally, I think we shouldn’t get too hung up on terminology – the important thing is to write in a way that makes people alive to problems around them and leaves them feeling empowered to respond. The authors succeed on both counts: Klein has spent almost three decades outlining the connections between unrestrained capitalism and violent, anti-democratic tendencies, while Taylor, a Canadian-American film-maker, writer and activist, is a veteran of movements for social justice.

They set out how our economic system, “built on limitless growth, and on limitless wealth for the winners”, has collided with the reality that life on this planet is becoming harder to sustain. As a psychological balm, reactionaries offer “bursts of sadistic satisfaction summoned by footage of immigrants in supermax prisons, or soldiers marching through the streets” that only lead to demands for even more extreme measures. At the same time, the right is prone to splits and overreach, making it vulnerable to challenge by progressives whose ultimate goal must be to dismantle the concentration of wealth and power that got us into this mess in the first place.

Klein and Taylor draw particular inspiration from Zohran Mamdani, whose successful run for the New York mayoralty showed it was possible to build a winning coalition by focusing on people’s material concerns – and by celebrating difference rather than trying to deny or apologise for it. They also point to other, creative forms of resistance in the US and elsewhere as the seeds of a new politics “rooted in an expansive, open-armed sense of neighbourliness” that can counter the right’s dystopian visions of the future. The way Venetians challenged Jeff Bezos’s attempt to use their city as a backdrop for his grotesque display of wealth disguised as a wedding, for instance. Or how Minnesotans looked out for one another as their state was bombarded with ICE raids. For the authors, the leftwing, diasporic Jewish idea of doikayt, or “hereness” – fighting for justice and equality wherever you may live – is a guiding principle, but only one of a multiplicity of cultural and political traditions that can be drawn on.

Here, the account falters a little. End Times Fascism has due regard for the global context, but this is largely a book about the US. That’s not a problem in itself: the US is still (just about) the global hegemonic power. But it does raise questions about where the best lessons can be learned. Is the rest of the world expected to take its cue from American progressives? Or is there more we could discover, say, in parts of the world where reactionary, authoritarian politics has prevailed for longer – and where people might have developed longer-term strategies?

It’s not Klein and Taylor’s job to answer these questions comprehensively, though. Their valuable contribution is to map out the frightening new territory in which we find ourselves, and point to an escape.

Daniel Trilling is the author of If We Tolerate This: How the British Establishment Made the Far Right Respectable (Picador). End Times Fascism And the Fight for the Living World by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor is published by Allen Lane (£25). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

If Jane Austen’s novels run on closed social worlds, courtship rituals, status anxiety, gossip and relentless scrutiny of who’s coupling with who, it follows that the obvious contemporary equivalent would be reality television.

That’s according to Andrew Davies, the writer who has spent decades modernising British period dramas.

Speaking on Radio 4’s Today programme on Monday, Davies revealed that he had been watching Made in Chelsea while working on an adaptation of Austen’s unfinished novel The Watsons.

“It’s stimulating really for relationships and ideas,” he said of the Channel 4 series, which follows the relationship dramas and social rivalries of affluent young residents of west London. “These young men and women in The Watsons, for example, are very analogous to Made in Chelsea.”

Davies, whose memoir An Unsuitable Boy: A Life in Scripts is out this week, is responsible for the legendary image of Colin Firth as Mr Darcy emerging from a lake in a wet shirt in his 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, which went some way to injecting Austen into Bridget Jones, written by Helen Fielding around the time it aired. His approach, he said, had been about “bringing out the sex that’s inherent in Austen”.

He has previously described his 2019 adaptation of Sanditon as “Love Island” in Austen’s world and talked about whether Charlotte would “friend-zone” someone or experience a “fanny flutter”. Meanwhile Rose Williams, who starred in the series, said she believed “Austen would probably write something satirical about Love Island if she were alive today”.

Joe Bray, an Austen scholar and professor of English at the University of Sheffield, said of the author: “Jane Austen was a shrewd observer of the fashionable manners and fads adopted by the young … and the plots of most of her novels are driven by sexual attraction and/or secret liaisons and engagements.”

The Steele sisters in Sense and Sensibility, he suggested, “would make perfect reality show contestants”.

Austen also pioneered a way of representing the unspoken thoughts and feelings of her female characters that can be difficult to translate to screen. But Bray noted that Austen herself loved gossiping about neighbours and acquaintances in letters to her sister Cassandra. “I can’t say for certain whether or not she would be a viewer of Made in Chelsea or Love Island,” he said, “but … she would be interested at least!”

An academic essay on Made in Chelsea described the programme as a “kind of homage” to Austen, arguing that its subject was the “courtship rituals” of young people with money and property, and compared its social world to Pride and Prejudice and Emma.

There is indeed a human link between Made in Chelsea and Netflix’s forthcoming Pride and Prejudice: the latter’s writer and executive producer, Dolly Alderton, began her career as a story producer on the reality show – where, she has said, her job involved turning the romantic entanglements of wealthy young Londoners into “a four-part comedy drama”.

It remains to be seen whether the Netflix series draws any inspiration from Made in Chelsea, but Reddit users have previously theorised about whether Alderton took inspiration from the reality show, or her TV adaptation of her memoir Everything I Know About Love. “Who do we think the character ‘Kyle’ is based off? I’m getting Spencer Matthews and Jamie Laing [both Made in Chelsea cast members],” one wrote.

In her 2016 modernisation of Pride and Prejudice, Eligible, novelist Curtis Sittenfeld’s transplanted the Bennets to contemporary Cincinnati and made Chip Bingley a former reality-TV star who had appeared on The Bachelor.

“Reality dating shows are so formulaic, and courtship in Austen’s time was rigid and proscriptive,” Sittenfeld said. In other words, reality TV provided a modern equivalent for Austen’s world of carefully prescribed romantic encounters; in place of the wealthy unmarried man arriving in the neighbourhood, there is the reality-TV bachelor whose romantic availability is already a matter of public interest.

That may explain the extraordinary portability of Austen, from Clueless, which transplanted Emma to 1990s LA, and Bridget Jones’s Diary to Fire Island, Persuasion and the forthcoming Sense and Sensibility.

John Mullan, a literature professor at University College London and historical and dialogue consultant on Bridgerton, identified another parallel.

“In Austen’s fiction, courtship mostly takes place under the eyes of others,” he said. “Young women and men who might fancy each other are very rarely alone.”

But, he added, there is a crucial difference: “What about propriety, restraint, repression? These are also key to Austen’s stories and characters.”

To encounter Virginia Woolf and Chantal Akerman is to be plunged into worlds where women who are mothers are watched by women who are daughters. But centering motherhood in their works is not an exclusionary or rigidly gendering move, pointing instead to the novelist and filmmaker’s expansive feminist interest in reaching audiences like and unlike themselves. At the recent MoMA retrospective of Akerman’s work, the more I watched, the more Woolfian the director felt for her sustained invitation to read and interpret cinematically through different mother figures, as well as her direct references to Woolf’s writing. During the five-week retrospective, I was immersed in Akerman’s work in a way that was previously impossible. And as I watched Akerman’s films in the museum’s basement black box theaters, I began to think about Woolf and Akerman’s use of motherhood as a kind of conduit: an invitation from these childless daughters to engage with their works afresh.

Motherhood as a theme is so freighted in contemporary discourse, as if gender politics is for old-fashioned moms rather than something that affects all of us all the time. Even in the left-leaning academic circles that I often find myself, asking Woolf’s question from A Room of One’s Own—How many women authors appear on your bookshelves?—is sometimes treated like a leftover question not urgent enough for our genocidal times. Meanwhile, political forces outside academia are forcing women’s studies departments to close at universities across the US and leaders who are largely though not exclusively men obstruct women’s rights globally.

In this claustrophobic context, Akerman’s focus on her mother, Natalia, and her invocations of Woolf were a welcome rush of fresh air. For both filmmaker and writer, an interest in their own mothers transforms into an obsessive interest in how we read anyone or interpret anything. Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse, about Mrs. Ramsay, and Akerman’s films like Letters Home, about Sylvia Plath and her mother, Aurelia, or News from Home, featuring snippets of Natalia Akerman’s letters, are staggering emotional works that move fluidly between the personal and political. In Woolf’s and Akerman’s hands, “the mother” is someone with whom to have a lifelong conversation, a contested perspective through which to read the world.

As the MoMA retrospective went on, it began to feel relevant, a word I normally hold at arm’s length. These days, advertisements and sloganeering of all kinds declare so confidently what is, and is not, relevant to each of us based on what seems to me flimsy evidence from social media algorithms. But insofar as trad wives, male loneliness, and opposition to queer and nonbinary people are relevant today, these women’s work—Woolf’s portraits of mothers who are not Angels in the House, including Clarissa Dalloway in a novel celebrating its centenary in 2025, or the mothers we meet in Akerman’s movies—reminds us that a relationship so available for cultural idealization and saccharine stereotyping is, still, uneasy emotional terrain.

The difficulties of mothering and daughtering are mapped by Woolf precisely onto the challenges of reading well. In an essay about thinking through illness, Woolf recommends that we undertake “rash reading”: a kind of dreamy, half-attentive reading, which discards hyper-fixation on textual particulars for an intuitive connection with the work. “It is rashness we need in reading Shakespeare,” she writes.¹ If we read like dutiful students, any Great Book “intimidates and bores, and all the views of all the critics dull in us that thunder clap of conviction” contained within any significant work of art. This is the approach that allowed Woolf to turn memories of her own mother into the multilayered portrait of Mrs. Ramsay. We need to read rashly, in this sense, to avoid stereotypes about classic literature and about mothers.²

Woolf’s pacifism and feminism so closely inform her writerly logic that she explicitly discusses reading as political action, albeit a small one.³ Read the classics rashly, Woolf suggests, read them as you would when you are ill and impatient to get at the essence of so-called great works.

To learn to read via Woolf and Akerman is, crucially, about the proper exercise of our rights as citizens and cultural co-creators. Reading is a form of political thinking, argued Woolf in her 1926 essay “How Should One Read a Book?”⁴ For her, reading was an exercise of civil liberties, and she answers the question in her title by centering “that independence which is the most important quality that a reader can possess.”⁵ Already a regular reviewer for the TLS and author of many books by the time she asked, not quite innocently, how one ought to read, Woolf rejects the commonplace hierarchy between writer and reader. If we expected Woolf to be an author who would want her reader to pay close attention, nose to page, then she surprises us with her actual recommendation: “Is there not an open window on the right hand of the bookcase? How delightful to stop reading and look out!”⁶

Hers is not the zone out of a beach read, where the sun and waves help turn off our attention. Rash reading is floating with intent. This is reading that looks out the window to find more clearly what the book says.

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Akerman takes up the Woolfian demand that audiences co-create the work of art. In many of her movies, Akerman refuses to use cinema’s narrative tools, especially plot and sound, in ordinary ways. In Jeanne Dielman famously, and even more challengingly in features like her 65-minute silent documentary, Hotel Monterey, she asks instead that we read each frame without the habitual conveniences of mainstream cinema, however uncomfortable such an experience might be.

And it is difficult to experience Akerman’s vision—of, for example, a seedy New York hotel turned into a series of Rothko-like doors and hallways to the sublime or subconscious—without any mediation by sound. My ears ring with tinnitus in the silence, I can’t focus thanks to the woman behind me searching her purse for candy; I can hear the E or M train roaring by the MoMA’s underground theater making everything inside rattle, reminding us it’s getting darker and colder in the autumn outside. These are distractions that inform my reading experience and to read well is also to take into account such paratexts that influence our impressions.

Even when she does not play with extended length or film sound, Akerman turns a relatively straightforward literary adaptation like Almayer’s Folly into a meditation on colonialist education and bad interpretive habits. Her directorial perspective—a liberal use of wide-frame medium and long shots, a resistance to the emotional manipulation of extreme closeups or conventional soundtrack—are cinematic features with which Akerman invites audiences to think beyond plot.

It is hard not to overidentify with Woolf and Akerman who, like so many of us, walk that tricky line between needing our mothers and resisting their influence.

Woolfian rash reading and Akermanian slow watching come from their shared perspective that interpretive acts are always difficult, intimate, gendered, whether on the page or on screen. As daughters, they address themselves to me as much as to Jeanne Dielman’s son Sylvain or Woolf’s gender-inclusive Common Reader. Renewed attention to alternative motherhood narratives is so very necessary in the present, as we face profound denigration of women’s political and health-care needs in the US and many countries globally. It is hard not to overidentify with Woolf and Akerman who, like so many of us, walk that tricky line between needing our mothers and resisting their influence.⁷

Woolf’s most famous lecture, A Room of One’s Own, still speaks to women artists today. Yet the bulk of her essays (and she wrote so very many essays) are for women and working-class people invited to read, and think, and vote for the first time in the 20th century. Woolf repeatedly says that old-fashioned professors and critics hinder such readers in the immense cultural and educational leveling that we are still navigating in this 21st century.⁸

If we read well, we will move toward a classless society, Woolf optimistically claims. One of the last essays she completed before her death, “The Leaning Tower,” began as a speech to a mixed-gender working-class audience at the Workers’ Educational Association in May 1940 in Brighton; the association had invited her to tell them about trends in contemporary British literature. The end of her speech touches me deeply, knowing the heavy depression she struggled with and the very real fear that her Jewish husband and herself were on a list of public figures to be rounded up if Germany won. From within her dread, Woolf declares that one of the pillars of a properly functioning egalitarian democracy is the public library. Using this unprecedented access to free books,

We have got to teach ourselves to understand literature. Money is no longer going to do our thinking for us. Wealth will no longer decide who shall be taught and who not…. Literature is no one’s private ground; literature is common ground. It is not cut up into nations; there are no wars there. Let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way for ourselves.

To trespass freely is to go where our mothers couldn’t, or didn’t, but where we, thanks to them, can venture. Woolf’s writerly and political opinions extended well beyond those of her socially conservative mother, not rejecting Julia Stephen outright but understanding the limits of her loving authority and committing to a lifetime of writing against prejudice. Given that even powerful pedophiles appreciate complex novels, we cannot uncritically endorse Woolf’s opinion that reading well leads to better humanity and citizenship. Even so, an educated populace is historically harder to manipulate and oppress.

Rash reading, slow watching: these contradict our culture’s worst too-online habits, such as “skim reading” or “second screening.” It makes intuitive sense that neither Woolf nor Akerman offer easy or simple reading experiences in their books and movies.⁹ Woolf always pushed herself to change the contours of normative genre boundaries, and there too, Akerman is with her. To read well is intrinsically about reading (and writing) outside the expressive clichés that we are bombarded with in popular media. Woolf writes “novels” as much as Akerman makes “movies”—but they resist attempts to pinpoint what generically they are up to.¹⁰ Woolf and Akerman make unskimmable works, without the simplified narrative structures that allow contemporary audiences to speed through content at increased playback speeds. My undergraduates working on To the Lighthouse joke about how they need to reread sentences or even whole pages to keep up with the twists and turns of a banal dinner party that is, nevertheless, unputdownable fiction.

In the Woolfian creative mode, a reader or viewer completes an artwork by exercising her own creativity to think and complete the narrative conversation. To be a good reader, for Woolf, does not rest in knowing factoids and trivia about a movie, nor in being an academic immersed in archival minutiae. If anything, too much detail obscures thinking; the mother figure looms too large when we are very close and Woolf reminds us to look up, look outside, get our sights straight. Her ideal reader is not just someone like her sister, the artist Vanessa Bell; it is also a stranger whom she calls a “Common Reader.” Such a person—similar to the working-class adult students Woolf first met when teaching at Morley College from 1905 to 1907—is not someone to be lectured at, but, instead, conversed with.¹¹

Textual difficulty in such hands is not obtuse or classist or designed to separate so-called highbrow audiences from ordinary ones. Rather, Woolf wrote for the Common Reader in 1920s England, insisting on their sophistication, refusing to see them as lumpenproletariat. As Alice Staveley reminds us, Virginia and Leonard’s publishing company, the Hogarth Press, sold books—including Woolf’s novels and also poems by T. S. Eliot and excerpts from James Joyce—in “countless shops, railway stalls, steamship lines, libraries, educational institutes, schools, and private homes across the United Kingdom and around the globe, from London to Manchester, Edinburgh to Tokyo, Sydney to Cape Town, Birmingham to Mumbai.”¹²

Similarly, curators of Akerman retrospectives point out that part of the highbrow fame of the filmmaker is the result of her works being hard to locate—sometimes even now available only via museum retrospectives, not on disc or on demand—rather than about her content or approach. This is a question of supply rather than accessibility. (Some more evidence: even armed with an academic library and NYPL membership, I could not locate a copy of Akerman’s book, Chantal Akerman: Self Portrait before writing this essay.) Echoing Woolf’s demand that ordinary citizens make her work their own, Akerman asks for sensitivity from viewers not predicated on cultural or economic elitism. Rather, her frequent changes of genre—from slow cinema to documentaries, short films, and musicals—reflects a career-long desire to connect with diverse audiences.

For all the cinematic elements in her prose writing, Woolf was not a straightforward champion of the movies as art. This is surprising, because she went to the cinema regularly throughout her life: watching Tarzan movies with her sister, comedies by Keaton and Chaplin, Hollywood romances, documentaries, art films, and Surrealist shorts.¹³ In her essay “The Cinema,” she calls the movies a “parasite” artform.¹⁴ This from someone who so admired The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari! The problem with cinema—at least typical mainstream cinema—is the rigid symbolism that movies often rely upon: “A kiss is love. A smashed chair is jealousy. A grin is happiness. Death is a hearse.”¹⁵ Woolf’s examples are of visual symbols reduced on film to the emotional equivalent of a drugstore greeting card.

Such material leads to inane sentiments and just bad reading. But I think Woolf herself would be satisfied with Akerman’s Un jour Pina a demandé… (One Day Pina Asked…). This is ostensibly a “concert movie,” but one that turns such a generic term into an hour-long exploration of artistic mastery, influence, and dread. The movie begins with Pina Bausch’s dancers explaining her practice of starting each production by asking them: What are you proud of? The rest of the film is frenetic, showing scenes in rehearsal and during shows that confusingly blend locations and dances into one long fever dream we share with the Bausch troupe. The final wrenching scene is of Bausch looking tired and pale, wishing for herself some strength to face “big problems” in the world (which ones? She does not specify), before a jarring cut to the credits sequence set loudly to Chaplin’s theme song from Modern Times.

What do we make of such juxtapositions? What does Akerman via Pina ask of her dancers, herself, and us? Akerman does not tell us where to go. We each provide the conclusion to such an experience.

Akerman always filmed from her own height, contrary to film school dictum. The result is that we quite literally inhabit her perspective…

Woolf first met her Common Readers in nontraditional college classrooms. So I find it a nice coincidence that Akerman also taught for some years in a program that attracts all kinds of filmmakers, at City College of the City University of New York. My obsession with them both is stoked by a sense that we share the experience of conversing with students who are not much like the ones attending Oxbridge or small liberal arts colleges in the US. Inclusive public higher education also brings me in contact with minds that are independent and acute in ways that I learn from every year.

During an introductory-level media studies class this fall, at the very heights of my Woolf-Akermania, my undergraduates found out that I often watch movies much longer than “normal” runtimes of two hours or less. The best seeds are planted through humor, so it was delightful to be teased for liking Jeanne Dielman, Sátántangó, Occupied City. “So what do you learn from watching these kinds of movies?” a student asked. Well, they teach me to read, I said, fumbling for words.

Akerman filming the musician Alfred Brendel in a 1989 documentary came to mind as I scrambled to express myself in front of the class. In discussing Schubert’s sonatas, Brendel says, “Classical forms describe boundaries,” and experimental forms let us (artists and audiences) wander “at the precipice” beyond set limits. Akerman shoots Brendel in his studio, the camera often zooming out to show a beautiful upper-story room with floor-to-ceiling windows lit by the winter sun turning over the afternoon hours of filming. Tight close-ups of Brendel’s face ease into roomy long shots, inviting us to look past him and through the window in an evocatively Woolfian way.

Akerman always filmed from her own height, contrary to film school dictum. The result is that we quite literally inhabit her perspective, see what she sees, laugh alongside her at affectionate absurdities or consider urgent questions about national belonging as images of stormy clouds over the Mediterranean.¹⁶ My words can only hold space for what it means to have shared Akerman’s view of the winter light changing on a tree to the right of the frame as an old maestro plays music that he obsessively loves. There is something wild in her many portraits of other artists and practitioners that defies my ability to bring things into words. This essay—boiled down to a befuddling maxim, read rashly, watch slowly—is the closest I can get.

Reading freely, beyond the limits of genre and authority, is wild and scary. So are the responsibilities of democracy, of trespassing “freely and fearlessly [to] find our own way for ourselves.” 

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Sebastian Faulks’s latest book focuses on the most irreconcilable geopolitical struggle of our age, the Israel-Palestine conflict. While “the sound of mortar and machine gun, the collision of flesh and metal” are integral to Faulks’s best known works, such as Birdsong, in his 17th novel the military presence is a peacekeeping one. It’s 1946 and infantry officer Philip Deval, who saw action in Normandy, is deployed to the Holy Land to take part in maintaining Britain’s mandate in Palestine. Initially Philip is second in command of a battalion overseeing febrile relationships between Jewish and Arab communities. Britain’s profound failures and manipulation in the region, and the imminence of its disastrous departure from the territory, come under scrutiny.

While able to drum up motivation and cheer for the men in his battalions, privately Philip wrestles with inner melancholy. He is “shrouded” in a “loneliness … that insulates him from the world”. Experiences on the battlefield and other, slowly elucidated tragedies have led to his pessimistic bent. Much of what Philip observes in the Middle East, and his “foreboding” sense of its intractable problems, only confirms his despairing sense of human nature. It also underlines his ambivalence towards notions of divine benevolence.

In Jerusalem, Philip and some of his men find themselves in a raucous bar. They jostle along among multicultural crowds, those “with yarmulkes, tarbushes … barehead Armenians and Greeks … [all] playing dice and cards in a mix of tongues”. Philip knows that “soon they would [all] be killing each other … Humans had worked out the movements of the planets and prised apart the indivisible atom; they cured mysterious diseases and found a new way, by trade, of making themselves richer than the sum of their possessions … But a group of closely related people in a fertile landscape couldn’t find a way to coexist.”

This inability to coexist does, indeed, frequently erupt into shocking violence and inevitable reprisals. Faulks captures these with his typically steady and unblinking attention, in scenes where both the seriousness of his research and his instinct for affecting fictive detail is clear. Not long after Philip’s arrival in the region, Zionist paramilitaries bomb the King David Hotel, location of the headquarters of the Palestine police and the British administration. While helping to rescue survivors from the debris, “in a Remington [typewriter] that Philip lifted clear, there were three severed female fingers jammed between the keys”.

Faulks’s plots often cultivate friendships formed in duress. Here, Matthew Kilvert, a priest attached to the peacekeeping mission, has a “genial energy”. He’s fantastically enthusiastic about staging a Christmas production, cast with officers and locals of all backgrounds, of The Importance of Being Earnest. His uproarious Lady Bracknell becomes the talk of the town. Matthew forms an enduring closeness with Philip; their dialogue often glitters with an easy, youthful humour and they are able to share opposing views of what it means to have faith with an instructive conviviality and curiosity. There is a beautiful, strangely rendered moment when Matthew thinks he has had a vision of Christ. Philip listens to Matthew’s retelling of the encounter with quiet interest.

A different friendship also shapes Philip’s progress in the novel. With postwar employment opportunities limited, after demobbing Philip retrains as a French teacher and takes up a post at a girls’ boarding school where he and music mistress Frances Darwood – as stiff as Philip is wont to be – strike up a delicate and important confidence. Over evenings listening to recordings of Ravel and Bach, the two gradually share stories of their pasts and the historical forces that have shaped them. This process proves especially harrowing for Frances. Alongside Philip’s detailed recounting of his time in the Holy Land and the desolate realities of weary postwar Britain, Frances’s horrific wartime recollections contribute to the panoramic ambitions of the novel. Faulks is deft in the management of his ample material, throwing in the odd, energising shift in narrative perspective too – an echo of the more sustained polyphony of A Week in December. There is a lightness and unpredictability in the movement between stories and periods, a kind of deliberate structural restiveness that is of a piece with Philip’s psychic disquiet. This mobility in the organisation of the story culminates in some thrillingly clever late-stage plot developments that are every bit as dramatic as the concluding sections of Faulks’s 2007 novel, Engleby.

While characteristically expansive in its scope, at its core Farewell to Eden is about disillusionment and morally compromised nations, peoples and individuals. The lamenting tone of the title – and indeed of the text at large – reflects a work mourning seeming certainties or easy categorical distinctions. It is a novel that asks us what we might do when unavoidably faced with our own imperfection and fallibility, and is wise and sober in its refusal to trumpet answers.

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