The measure of things

I read this review more than a little sorry, not because it doesn’t accord with my view but because it feels lazy, a missed opportunity to engage with the substance and depth of the book. The reviewer overreaches for “Nietzschean thinking” and “Faulknerian rhythms", chastises the author for not providing her with the answers she requires, in a book about questions, as its title suggests. What a stark contrast to the review by Tara June Winch in the Guardian (3/11/23), which articulated my own response to the book: “Only the best writing is so affecting that a reader has a physical reaction.” Where this review found fault with a recurring line in the book, “that’s life,” calling it an “adage reek[ing] of complacency", Winch understands these words as powerful, “a break in the horror, antidote to the question itself". This review concludes by holding the author responsible for more in the context of the Israel-Hamas war and the Voice referendum, while Winch begins hers by finding “clarity” in the book in the midst of such devastation. It’s no mean feat to provide a review for a book that is so much abut the unknowable, but that is the challenge, one I was looking forward to us taking up.