Granta

One year after Sri Lanka’s civil war ended in 2009, my family travelled to the city of Jaffna after the main highway leading to the country’s north reopened to tourists. Driving up the narrow, two-lane road as it became progressively bumpier, the busy towns, Buddhist temples, and green rice paddy fields of the central region gave way to scrubland sparsely broken up by army checkpoints, villages with ruined buildings dotted with bullet holes, and small roadside stores in front of which sat people whose eyes followed our van with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion. We were met by the same enquiring eyes when we reached Jaffna, a port city whose temples and institutional buildings are marked by Hindu and colonial Portuguese architectural styles, respectively. Jaffna’s population differs culturally and linguistically from its neighbours in the southern provinces of the island, where my family originates. Essentially, we had landed in a foreign country.

Who better to shepherd us through a once-in-a-century pandemic than Rebecca Solnit? The prolific essayist, activist, and critic has long acted as a lodestar for progressives to follow in times of despair, providing encouragement to find Hope in the Dark (2004), as she did in a collection of essays after the beginning of the Iraq War, and demonstrating how human ingenuity can shine through in the wake of a disaster like Hurricane Katrina in A Paradise Built in Hell (2009).

Modern US culture has a peculiar love of the extracurricular world of teenagers, valorising the spelling bees, debating competitions, and varsity-level football games of its youth. In Ben Lerner’s new novel, The Topeka School, the interscholastic debating trophy is so sought after that tournaments resemble verbal combat, in which high-school competitors rely on sly technique rather than substance. Witness the use of what our teenage protagonist, Adam Gordon, aptly refers to as ‘the spread’: a rapid-fire, near-hysterical diatribe designed to deliver so many arguments in such a short amount of time that the opposing team will be unable to address each point.

On the first page of her book Hope in the Dark (2004), Rebecca Solnit quotes from Virginia Woolf’s diary: ‘The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be, I think.’ Such optimism is, Solnit acknowledges, surprising. But it’s a persistent theme in her work and it finds ...

In 2013, publisher Sigrid Rausing significantly reduced Granta magazine’s staff, and long-time editor John Freeman resigned. At this news, various high-profile contributors, including Peter Carey, expressed their concern for the future of the magazine. But if we can judge solely on the quality of this edition, the new Rausing-edited Granta has lost none of its verve. It remains chock-full of fine writing and art.

With fate as its theme, much of the work in this edition speaks to love, loss, and mortality. Which is not to say that it makes for grim reading. The lead story, Louise Erdrich’s ‘Domain’, may be dark in subject matter, but it is also playful. A take on a no doubt popular science fiction theme, ‘Domain’ presents a future world in which the quality of your digitally uploaded afterlife is determined by which of the various corporate-owned simulations you can afford. It is literary in tone without sacrificing the pay-off of genre.

In Ben Lerner’s second novel, 10:04, weather maps that promise hurricanes deliver mere showers. The symptoms presented by an ailing human body don’t always yield a diagnosis and the night sky is a mystery. Excavated dinosaur bones can suggest that a creature as wonderful as a brontosaurus might have existed and then, on review, reveal that marvel to have been a fiction all along. It is hard to make sense of all this cultural, biological, and physical data; to integrate, as the narrator of this remarkable novel reflects, ‘all that information into a larger picture’.

Granta’s recent offering, a special edition devoted to Japan, is a brilliant homage to Japanese wabi sabi. Editor Yuka Igarashi has selected stories and artwork that challenge the tired stereotypes of Nippon to deliver a series of powerful works exploring wabi sabi’s investment in what Andrew Juniper has identified as ‘impermanence, humility, asymmetry and imperfection’.

According to D.T. Max, ‘At the time of his tragic death by suicide in September 2008, David Foster Wallace was the foremost writer of his generation, the one who had forged the newest path and from whom the others, directly or indirectly, took their cues.’ Indeed, for someone desperate to escape the confines of self and wary of literary celebrity, Wallace endured more than his share of hype and admiration. This paradox is unsurprising when we consider Wallace’s repeated depictions of bleak coincidence in his fiction. Early in Infinite Jest (1996), footballer Orin Incandenza – the elder brother of physically deformed Mario and hyper-intelligent Hal – suffers a nightmare of being smothered by his mother’s disembodied head; when Orin wakes, his latest ‘Subject’ (sexual conquest) is watching a documentary about schizophrenia. Mediated by Orin, the voice-over describes its subject:

Arthur Conan Doyle wrote, ‘Where there is no imagination, there is no horror.’ The 117^th issue of Granta is not short of imagination. Contributions range from a posthumously published zombie tale by Roberto Bolaño, to translated reportage on Peru by Santiago Roncagliolo, to new fiction by Stephen King. In Don DeLillo’s ‘The Starveling’, an elderly cinephile wanders the streets of Manhattan looking for a purpose. His life, which revolves around movie screenings, is a disturbing portrait of idleness. Even the most disconcerting circumstances fail to shake him from his malaise.