Good Soldiers, Bad War - on David Finkel's Iraq
David Finkel is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who has covered conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kosovo for The Washington Post. From January 2007, Finkel was embedded with Battalion 2-16 for the duration of their fifteen month deployment as a part of George W. Bush’s ‘Surge’. In The Good Soldiers, Finkel tracks the battalion’s experiences and morale as they work to blunt insurgency in occupied Iraq. Finkel’s project is partly explanatory and informative, but his primary aim is to convey the individual experience and social dynamics of the battalion. He wants his readers to learn about the role of the infantry, but more importantly he wants them to engage with the soldiers’ situation.
America Agonistes - Sam Lipsyte's 'The Ask'
Who, in this age of late, post or undead capitalism is more superfluous than the aspiring artist? Who promises the least likely return, the lowest work-to-profit ratio and the highest likelihood of redundancy? With their seedling talents having barely pushed through the heavy sod, yet to produce any mature, robust or arresting foliage, the aspiring artist is always on the brink of nonentity.
Michael Borremans - A Victim of His Situation
Belgian Artist Michaël Borremans insists that his figurative works and portraits do not depict individuals. He aspires to the archetypal, the generic and the anonymous. Identity is a retrograde myth, social function and structural determination are the defining human conditions. So it goes. But Borremans’ figures invite a kind of sympathetic response which undermines his arguments against the dignity of the individual.
Nowhere Man - Invisible by Paul Auster
Auster doesn’t have many conspicuous strengths as a novelist. His prose can sound a bit robotic. His characters are types. His dialogue can be radically unconvincing. You could take the view that Auster keeps these things flat deliberately, because he wants his novels to have the texture of fables. Or maybe his novels read like fables because he has no style. I don’t think we can rule this explanation out.