SPENT LIGHT by Lara Pawson

The humble literary mnemonic has come a long way since Proust’s narrator nibbled on a tea-soaked madeleine. Far from the Frenchman’s long-winded, genteel remembrances, Lara Pawson uses everyday objects as cattle prods - with short, painful shocks meant to shake the reader’s complacency in a world gone mad. It begins with her dead neighbour’s toaster, which recalls semi-automatic weapons, masturbation and the CIA. Her oven hobs bring to mind swastikas and, given it’s a gas oven, the camps. As she looks around her kitchen, she sees Gaza and the Angola and Iraq. She sees bodily fluids, sex, instruments of torture. All in the most mundane of things: a tile, a vase, a poster of Samuel Beckett. Think Jenny Offill in Hell.

Spent Light makes for compelling but uncomfortable - sometimes unbearably so - reading and yet it is framed as an act of love. The narrator is addressing a partner who is not there, desperate to share a message of beauty. There seems a purity in purging; face the brutality of our modern world head on if you hope to find any pockets of goodness. It’s the healing touch of vivisection. I’ll never look at my frypan the same way again.

Spent Light by Lara Pawson
CB Editions, 2024
135 pages