More on: Culture

Like Mackey, [Howe] is forced to interpret the historical recurrence of evil as cruelly fated; human beings are the unwitting playthings of what she calls, in Manimal Woe, “the mystery of repetition.”

One can almost hear T.S. Eliot, the native Missourian in his self-imposed exile from America, looking out over these rust belts and muttering, “I had not thought that globalism had undone so many.”

Duplex isn’t a disenchanted world, where saints have been replaced by stonemasons. It’s not even a world where belief in the soul has been replaced by the fact of robots. It’s a hinged world, a duplex world, where the human and the cosmic, the soul and the stars, stand side by side.

The musical metaphors and techniques here surpass a simple recitation of the creed, in part because the music is doing something deeply trinitarian, and you don’t need music theory to feel this in your body.

Today, in a comprehensive fulfilment of biblical promise, your iPhone, which counts your steps and is acquainted with your ways both public and private, will offer to route your path home and watch over your lying down.

It’s as though the movie represents an alternate life for any of us. Take away a job. Take away a spouse. Take away an able body. Take away good mental health. How many of us could maintain our current lifestyles for long before we’d feel the crunch, the walls closing in?

It is a horrible, wrenching, annihilating sentence. Erpenbeck, in all her unsentimental moral rigor, refuses to look away from the moment of absolute horror.

For if there were a heavenly recorder, then Frank could be assured that someone would make sense of his life, that it would not be lost to memory but would always be an object of significance.

Later on, in high school, I would see those same artworks in my books and listen to my professor explaining their importance. Probably because they were within a five-minute walk and I knew them by heart, I didn’t have any real interest in them, nor in any of what Pasolini would call “my intimate, profound, archaic Catholicism.” I was interested in Hegel.

Glück’s novel was a particularly poignant book to read this spring, when I found myself abruptly unable to touch another person, go to Mass, or receive the Eucharist. Lent rolled on without any anticipation of a liberatory Easter; then it was Easter, and I was still alone.