T H I S W E E K
No. 6342
October 18 2024
the-tls.co.uk
UK £4.50 | USA $8.99
T H E T I M E S L I T E R A R Y S U P P L E M E N T
Heather Clark Sylvia Plath’s final say | Claire Lowdon Alan Hollinghurst gets Brexit done
Katie Stallard The dictator’s treadmill | Boyd Tonkin Keeping the Warburg weird
A world away from K-pop
Yoojin Grace Wuertz on Nobel laureate Han Kang
Han Kang © Gorm Kallestad/ NTB scanpix/Alamy
In this issue
S ylvia Plath once said that “nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing”. Ted Hughes curated two editions of her prose in 1977 and 1979, but admitted that his selections represented only a fraction of her work. Since then her correspondence has been collected in The Letters of Sylvia Plath (published in two volumes in 2017 and 2018), edited by Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V Kukil. After thirty years of labour in American university archives, Steinberg has now brought together all of her surviving fiction, reviews, essays and journalism in one volume, The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath.
Anne Kennedy Smith has written in these pages that “the melodramatic Plath myth” entailed that “for well over half a century she has been more famous for her death than for her life and work”. In recent years Plath’s oeuvre has benefited from more considered critical reassessment. Heather Clark, whose biography of the poet, Red Comet (2020), drew on her unpublished diar i es and creative work, salutes Steinberg’s enterprise. In her TLS lead review she writes that to see Plath’s prose “finally published under one cover is to be surprised all over again by the breadth of her vision, ambition and talent”. The highlights are the seventysix short stories written between 1940 and the early 1960s. The volume contains previously unpublished fragments that “make art of Plath and Hughes’s relationship”. Afternoon in Hardcastle Crags (1956), written three months after her marriage to Hughes, seems especially poignant – she “saw him famous and suave in a tuxedo, roaring sestinas in a godly voice over the BBC, in a dither of actresses, ballet dancers and Italian countesses with a literary flair, while she skulked about choking on cheese rinds like a tear-blind mouse”.
“For those not paying attention, it might feel as if we’ve woken to an overnight K-ification [of culture], in the form of K-drama, K-beauty, K-pop”, writes Yoojin Grace Wuertz on the award of the Nobel prize in literature to Han Kang. Han, however, is not a poster child for Korean cultural marketing, but rather a critic. Her novel The Vegetarian (2007) questions patriarchal authority, but transcends the form “as a hungry demand for a specific, utterly idiosyncratic experience of life free from every constraint”. Human Acts (2014), set during the military dictatorship’s massacre of unarmed civilians prote s t ing against martial l aw in her native c i t y, Gwangju, in 1980, and the subsequent cover-up, is too raw for many democratic politicians in Korea today. Hardly Gangnam style.
MARTIN IVENS
Editor
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2
3 LITERATURE
4 POEM
5 COMMENTARY
6 LETTERS TO THE
EDITOR
HEATHER CLARK
ALAN GILLIS
The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath Peter K. Steinberg, editor
Walking Out One Morning After Lockdown Has Been Lifted
YOOJIN GRACE WUERTZ A hunger for truth – Nobel laureate Han Kang makes uncomfortable reading for the Korean authorities
Israel and Palestine, Gaia, Thom Gunn, etc
7 LITERARY CRITICISM LUCY FLEMING
8 POLITICS
KATIE STALLARD
ALEXANDRE LEFEBVRE
The Haunted Wood – A history of childhood reading Sam Leith
Autocracy, Inc. – The dictators who want to run the world Anne Applebaum. How Tyrants Fall – And how nations survive Marcel Dirsus. The Origins of Elected Strongmen – How personalist parties destroy democracy from within Erica Frantz, Andrea Kendall-Taylor, Joseph Wright. The Reactionary Spirit – How America’s most insidious political tradition swept the world Zack Beauchamp. The Wannabe Fascists – A guide to understanding the greatest threat to democracy Federico Finchelstein On Freedom Timothy Snyder
12 ART HISTORY
BOYD TONKIN BEN STREET
Memory and Migration – The Warburg Institute 1926—2024 (Warburg Institute, London) The Story of Drawing – An alternative history of art Susan Owens. How Painting Happens – (And why it matters) Martin Gayford
15 ARTS
AMBER MASSIE-BLOMFIELD Waiting for Godot Samuel Beckett (Theatre Royal Haymarket,
London)
16 FICTION
JONATHAN GIBBS LORNA SCOTT FOX CLAIRE LOWDON
18 LITERATURE & HISTORY J. J. LONG
ALICE BLACKHURST SOFIA CUMMING
Childish Literature Alejandro Zambra; Translated by Megan McDowell The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine Mario Levrero; Translated by Annie McDermott and Kit Schluter Our Evenings Alan Hollinghurst
Shadows of Reality – A catalogue of W. G. Sebald’s photographic materials Clive Scott and Nick Warr, editors Colette – My literary mother Michèle Roberts Marseille 1940 – Die große Flucht der Literatur Uwe Wittstock
20 FEMINISM
22 ECOLOGY
24 IN BRIEF
26 LETTERS
26 POEM
27 AFTERTHOUGHTS
28 NB
JUNE PURVIS EILEEN M. HUNT
C. K. STEAD SEB FALK EMILY JONES
REECE SHEARSMITH
DAVID MORLEY
CRAIG RAINE
M. C.
Sexed – A history of British feminism Susanna Rustin Mary Wollstonecraft and Political Economy – The feminist critique of commercial modernity Catherine Packham
Koe – An Aotearoa ecopoetry anthology Janet Newman and Robert Sullivan, editors The Green Ages – Medieval innovations in sustainability Annette Kehnel; Translated by Gesche Ipsen The War Below – Lithium, copper, and the global battle to power our lives Ernest Scheyder
Extra Time Beckons, Penalties Loom – How to use (and abuse) the language of football Adam Hurrey, etc
Robert Aickman – Selected letters to Kirby McCauley Robert Aickman
Beethoven’s Yellowhammer
T. S. Eliot and Lytton Strachey
Britishisms vs Americanisms, New Worlds at sixty and other anniversaries
Editor MARTIN IVENS (editor@the-tls.co.uk) Deputy Editor ROBERT POTTS (robert.potts@the-tls.co.uk) Associate Editor CATHARINE MORRIS (catharine.morris@the-tls.co.uk) Assistant to the Editor LISA TARLING (lisa.tarling@the-tls.co.uk) Editorial enquiries (queries@the-tls.co.uk) Managing Director JAMES MACMANUS (deborah.keegan@news.co.uk) Advertising Manager JONATHAN DRUMMOND (jonathan.drummond@the-tls.co.uk)
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TLS
OCTOBER 18, 2024
