the author has always written close to the bone, and Of Memory and Margins sharpens that instinct into something approaching grace.
An issue from the Hudson archive — essays, verse, and review of the season's most necessary books.
Character, here, is not announced; it accumulates. We learn who these people are the way we learn it of our neighbours: through small refusals, half-finished meals, the books left face-down on a kitchen chair.
Listening to the Margins
The dialogue is doing several jobs at once. It tells us where we are. It tells us who is listening. And, more rarely, it tells us what the silence between two people actually costs.
“It is the rare novel that grows larger as it grows quieter.”
Character, here, is not announced; it accumulates. We learn who these people are the way we learn it of our neighbours: through small refusals, half-finished meals, the books left face-down on a kitchen chair.
Character, here, is not announced; it accumulates. We learn who these people are the way we learn it of our neighbours: through small refusals, half-finished meals, the books left face-down on a kitchen chair.
The Weight of the Quotidian
There are passages in this book that ask to be read twice, not because they are difficult, but because the first reading is too occupied with surprise to register the music underneath.
Of Memory and Margins is the kind of book that ends and then keeps ending — in conversations the next morning, in margins revisited a week later, in sentences that surface, unbidden, on long walks.
