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Articles by Shaj Mathew
Clarice Lispector’s Cosmology
Thank you for reading The Nation We hope you enjoyed the story you just read, just one of the many incisive, deeply-reported articles we publish daily. Now more than ever, we need fearless journalism that shifts the needle on important issues, uncovers malfeasance and corruption, and uplifts voices and perspectives that often go unheard in mainstream media.
Cracks in the Louvre Abu Dhabi
I had wanted to visit the Louvre Abu Dhabi a day earlier, but the Alhosn app on my phone was not working. Do not underestimate the Alhosn app. It confirms that you do not have Covid, and to get around Abu Dhabi these days, you’ll need to flash it everywhere. Locals tell me you can outsmart the app—just don’t refresh it once it turns green. But for those less inclined to risk angering a cosmopolitan autocracy, a PCR test is required every two weeks.
Sevgi Soysal’s Liberation of the Mind
In 1971, the Turkish novelist Sevgi Soysal found herself in prison. The charges? Obscenity, communism, and losing her ID. The first two were beyond dispute: The candor of her fiction, alongside her (complicated) commitment to communism, challenged the country’s conservative mores. But the last charge remains apocryphal. During an argument between friends, she apparently bellowed the word yeter (“enough!”) so loudly that it drew the attention of the police.
A Fortress to Faith - or Faith’s Undoing?
Fiction In Gala’s novel, Cienfuegos rivals Havana in terms of intrigue.Credit...Matthias Graben/imageBROKER, via Alamy Jan.
A Kenyan Woman Probes Ancient Links Between Africa and Asia (Published 2019)
Fiction Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, author of “The Dragonfly Sea.”Credit...Bernd Hartung May 9, 2019 THE DRAGONFLY SEA By Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor The Kenyan writer Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s second novel spans several lives, two continents, one body of water and at least six languages, but what holds it together is not a person, place or tongue.
“The Twice-Born,” A Searching Memoir About India’s Identity Crisis
“The Twice-Born,” a new memoir by Aatish Taseer, is troubled by a single plaintive question: Does a city steeped in tradition have a future in modern India? The setting is Benares, the spiritual capital of Hinduism, where more than five million pilgrims flock each year to worship, bathe, and burn their dead. Dying while in Benares, it is said, will release a Hindu from the cycle of reincarnation, and Taseer discovers an industry of death that’s alive and well in the city.
‘The Distant Marvels,’ by Chantel Acevedo
We tell ourselves stories in order to die. At least that’s the case for María Sirena, the senescent narrator of Chantel Acevedo’s uneven fourth novel, “The Distant Marvels,” which turns Joan Didion’s line on its head. María Sirena finds relief in narratives, though for her, they’re not so much life-affirming as they are palliative. Nearing the end, she needs to let go of her most closely guarded secrets in order to greet death with equanimity. This is storytelling as hospice.
A Debut Story Collection, Filled With Characters Humbled by Love
IF YOU SEE ME, DON’T SAY HI By Neel Patel 208 pp. Flatiron Books. $24.99. Neel Patel’s debut story collection is a study of doomed attachments. In “If You See Me, Don’t Say Hi,” no one is spared: Friendships fester, marriages combust and families fall into civilized distemper. Where did it all go wrong? Patel’s characters are trying to piece it together. In elaborate feats of retrospection, his 11 narrators re-enact conversations with lovers and friends, scrambling their memories for clues and causes.
The Power of the Louvre Abu Dhabi
The Louvre Abu Dhabi’s success will depend at least in part on whether its narrative about art is convincing. Its leadership has made a concerted effort to control this story very carefully: The art galleries do not have an open floor plan. Instead, visitors must follow the official path of the exhibition in order, from chapter one (“The First Villages”) to chapter two (“The First Great Powers”) up until chapter twelve (“A Global Stage”), where they can then exit.
Fathers, Sons, and the West in Orhan Pamuk’s Turkey
“Like all other Istanbul writers with one eye always on the West, I sometimes suffer in confusion,” Orhan Pamuk admits in his memoir, “ Istanbul: Memories and the City ,” reissued this month. The confusion has its origins in the nineteen-twenties, Pamuk explains, a decade when the Ottoman Empire fell, the Republic of Turkey was born, and President Mustafa Kemal Atatürk modernized the country by fiat.
An Inheritance of Lost Mothers
1. Observe. Akerman. In Book of Mutter, Kate Zambreno writes of how she remembers her mother always cleaning, scrubbing the floor on hands and knees, the house her domain and her garden her reprieve. At the end of her life, when time was short, her mother laments how she had slaved for her family. Was cleaning a form of exorcism for her? Perhaps.
Unwelcome guests
Pages: 227Price: $17.99Deepak Unnikrishnan’s novel-in-stories narrates a series of metamorphoses. Guest workers dissolve into passports, a man begins “moonlighting as a mid-sized hotel” and a sultan harvests a fresh crop of labourers. Elsewhere a man has grown a suitcase for a face, while a teenager’s tongue has fled his body, verbs soon spilling out and assuming forms of their own.
Stories of Fragmented Lives in the Emirates
Deepak Unnikrishnan’s novel-in-stories narrates a series of metamorphoses. Guest workers dissolve into passports, a man begins “moonlighting as a mid-sized hotel” and a sultan harvests a fresh crop of laborers. Elsewhere a man has grown a suitcase for a face, while a teenager’s tongue has fled his body, verbs soon spilling out and assuming forms of their own.
Hubris, Total Football, and the Ethics of Diving: David Winner on the Dutch Team's Chances
DW: I totally foresaw it [laughs]. No, it was highly likely they’d lose all three games and go home. Nobody had the faintest idea. I was intrigued that nobody in Holland had the faintest idea this would happen. There’s this John Carpenter film, The Thing, about an alien organism who is taking over, in which the character who may have been infected is locked in a tool shed and secretly cuts a cave beneath the hut and builds a spacecraft because he is the alien.
Brexit Exposes Britain’s Massive Inferiority Complex
Arguments for reclaiming national “sovereignty” are less about a boost in autonomy than about the jolt of self-confidence that going it alone would provide. Ex-London mayor Boris Johnson frequently indulges in this kind of rhetoric of national self-sufficiency.
Why Did Borges Hate Soccer So Much?
At first glance, the Argentine writer’s animus toward "the beautiful game" seems to reflect the attitude of today’s typical soccer hater, whose lazy gibes have almost become a refrain by now: Soccer is boring. There are too many tie scores. I can’t stand the fake injuries.
Jhumpa Lahiri’s Roman Holiday
So why does she do it? “Writing in another language,” she says, “represents an act of demolition, a new beginning.” Italian gives Lahiri the freedom to err. No longer encumbered by her mastery of English, she can experiment, revel in her new linguistic identity, play. In order to evolve as a writer, the freedom afforded by an alien tongue was necessary—even if, or precisely because, she will inevitably make mistakes.
Welcome to Literature’s Duchamp Moment
Postmodernism is now a rather unmeaning term, dulled by overuse, and unfit to describe a new group of authors of varying ages and nationalities who are often lumped together under its umbrella: Ben Lerner, Sophie Calle, Teju Cole, Tom McCarthy, Alejandro Zambra, Siri Hustvedt, Michel Houellebecq, Sheila Heti, W.G. Sebald, Orhan Pamuk, and Enrique Vila-Matas, the sexagenarian Barcelona-based writer who, with over 20 novels to his name, is perhaps the most prolific yet least-known of them all.
Why Did Borges Hate Soccer So Much?
“Soccer is popular,” Jorge Luis Borges observed, “because stupidity is popular.” At first glance, the Argentine writer’s animus toward “the beautiful game” seems to reflect the attitude of today’s typical soccer hater, whose lazy gibes have almost become a refrain by now: Soccer is boring. There are too many tie scores. I can’t stand the fake injuries.
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