MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
Domestic pyrotechnics
MATTHEW HAWKINS is drawn into the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India
MUSLIM WOMEN'S RIGHTS: A mural from the Shaheen Bagh protests by mostly Muslim women against the BJP's discriminatory Citizen Amendment Act, police brutality, poverty, unemployment and women's safety, February 2020
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New releases from Christina Alden and Alex Patterson, Odette Michell, Clementine Lovell
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a very readable account of Britain’s involvement in South America
Strip cartoons used to be the bread and butter of newspapers and they have been around for centuries. MICHAL BONCZA asks our own Paul Tanner about which bees are in his bonnet
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
RON JACOBS welcomes a timely homage to one of the IWW and CPUSA’s most effective orators
Heart Lamp
Banu Mushtaq, And Other Stories, £14.99
IN Heart Lamp: Selected Stories, matters marinate or smoulder. Readers get to pore over paragraphs while issues ignite.
Amid her precise environments, and their host of vivid social-class enmity/familial powerplay, writer Banu Mushtaq delineates volatile occurrence with trustworthy control. Her succinct flair in sketching distinct three-dimensional allies and adversaries sets her arena for pivotal realisation and outcome. I’m put in mind of the sparking of domestic pyrotechnics, blue touchpaper and all.
In translation by Deepa Bhasthi, many choice Kannada words persist. These are never italicised. The beauty of this choice means not only that the music of given names; details and condition of dress; inventories of foods – and reference to who’s doing the cooking – each remain powerfully intact. Original words are also used where legal forces and devices of tradition come into play and this all feels right, in recognition of documentary authenticity and cultural nuance. English language readers will sense and respect complex entities (Sharia, for example) while protagonists — many of them adorable against the odds — maintain voices of credible immediacy.
More from this author
MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
MATTHEW HAWKINS enjoys the perverse jocularity, depraved glamour and inner turbulence of the Tate gallery’s tribute to Leigh Bowery
MATTHEW HAWKINS enjoys a father’s memoir of life with his autistic son, and the music they explore together
MATTHEW HAWKINS gives us a sense of what to expect from Glasgow’s International Dance festival
