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
SPENT LIGHT by Lara Pawson
SPENT LIGHT by Lara Pawson
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