John Phipps
Of Mice & Man
Transcendent Kingdom
By Yaa Gyasi
Viking 256pp £14.99
Early on in Transcendent Kingdom, the narrator’s brother, Nana, is racially abused from the sidelines during a football match. Furiously, he sets out to decimate his opponents: ‘For the rest of that half he was little more than a blur, moving not with the elegance my father associated with soccer, but with pure fury.’ For his younger sister, Gifty, this provides ‘the lesson I have never quite been able to shake: that I would always have something to prove and that nothing but blazing brilliance would be enough to prove it.’
The episode has the teachable quality of a parable: it moves from a cause to a direct consequence, before providing an unexpected moral that sticks in the reader’s head. It operates at an economical remove from observed reality (does anyone, playing football, look like ‘a blur’?) and it demonstrates perfectly
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
Knowledge of Sufism increased markedly with the publication in 1964 of The Sufis, by Idries Shah. Nowadays his writings, much like his father’s, are dismissed for their Orientalism and inaccuracy.
@fitzmorrissey investigates who the Shahs really were.
Fitzroy Morrissey - Sufism Goes West
Fitzroy Morrissey: Sufism Goes West - Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah by Nile Green
literaryreview.co.uk
Rats have plagued cities for centuries. But in Baltimore, researchers alighted on one surprising solution to the problem of rat infestation: more rats.
@WillWiles looks at what lessons can be learned from rat ecosystems – for both rats and humans.
Will Wiles - Puss Gets the Boot
Will Wiles: Puss Gets the Boot - Rat City: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Twisters features destructive tempests and blockbuster action sequences.
@JonathanRomney asks what the real danger is in Lee Isaac Chung's disaster movie.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/eyes-of-the-storm