BEST INTERNATIONAL ALBUMS RELEASED WHEN THE WORLD HAD ALL BUT SHUT DOWN
Dua Lipa is a global pop phenomenon. Rina Sawayama is a relatively unknown, genre-meshing up-and-comer. But they share similarities. They’re both children of immigrants to the UK: Lipa is originally from Albania, Sawayama from Japan. And the sounds of their current albums—Lipa’s second and Sawayama’s debut—are heavily influenced by the music from the 1980s and ’90s they grew up hearing.
Future Nostalgia plays like a non-stop disco party on which Lipa samples or interpolates Olivia Newton-John (“Physical”), INXS (“Break Your Heart”) and White Town (“Love Again”). Sawayama includes nods to the likes of Janet Jackson, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera and, just like these acts, frequently embellishes dance-pop with elements of hard rock. But if Lipa mostly focuses on romantic relationships, Sawayama covers everything from familial bonds to friendship. Put either of their albums on and you’ll be able to shimmy yourself to whatever point in time you’d rather be in right now.
By Hilary Mantel
THE MIRROR & THE LIGHT
`512 (Kindle); 879 pages ike with any great tragedy, we know the end. Henry VIII will turn on his beloved advisor, Thomas Cromwell, and have him beheaded. But the gory spectacles of history are not what preoccupy Hilary Mantel, whose acclaimed historical trilogy has finally reached its conclusion. The Mirror & the Light comes eight years after Bring Up the Bodies, the previous book in the double-Booker-winning series. The finesse and complexity of the last book, however, make it well worth the wait. It is not a novel weighed down by historical detail, precisely researched as it is. Rather, it is a plunge into the darkest, most tender corners of Cromwell’s mind.
“Now we live in an age of coercion, where the king’s will is an instrument reshaped each morning,” Cromwell says early on—a prescient thought, for history has told us what he does not know yet. Having helped Henry annul his second marriage to Anne Boleyn, and having had her beheaded on the charge of adultery, Cromwell still cannot rest on his laurels. Nor can he rejoice in having pried the Church of England from the grip of papal jurisdiction. At the end of the day, he is answerable to a fickle tyrant—his own Frankenstein. The book, then, is not simply about his destruction, but also about what he has created.
Nations churn with the bad decisions of men, and Cromwell knows this truth well. It is he who tries to quash rebellions and foreign invasion, while also finding wives appropriate for both Henry’s lust and England’s future. An astute observer of history, Cromwell wonders, “Can you make a new England?” He then realises that the most you can do is “write a new story”. This wisdom eludes Henry, and that is why it is Cromwell who emerges as the true architect of the nation— one whose decisions reverberate through England even today.
But the fact is that Cromwell is not the king. He is a man of humble origins who worked his way to privilege. And so, he is also a man of many enemies. He bides his time as men whom he trusted plot to pull him down. It is too late by the time Henry regrets the execution. It takes 800 pages for Mantel to bring us the death we are expecting and yet she manages to captivate. But unlike the earlier two books, this one is not driven by plot. It is an interior slow-burn with a narrative voice that moves between third and second person. These routine shifts of gaze are masterful. They reveal a character who is both vile and compassionate, misogynist and yet more perceptive of women than his peers. Henry says, “Women are the beginning of all mistakes”, but Cromwell knows, “If she dies, [a woman] will be lamented and forgotten…If she lives, she must hide her wounds.” Despite the blood on Cromwell’s hands, Mantel makes us feel for him deeply— briefly, we might believe he was the lesser evil of evil men.
LAT THE END OF THE DAY, MANTEL’S CROMWELL IS ANSWERABLE TO A FICKLE TYRANT —HIS OWN FRANKENSTEIN
—Poorna Swami
Colum McCann’s novel Apeirogon follows the careers of two men, each grieving the loss of a child to the violence of the IsraeliPalestinian conflict. From their anger, they converge toward a longing for peace. The novel is structured in numbered sections. Some sections are just one sentence and some run over several pages. They go up to 500 and then come back down again, and if the reader at, say, 220 in the returning half goes back out of curiosity to 220 from the first half, that reader is often rewarded. The structure is reminiscent of the yin-yang diagram, but there is no black and white in McCann’s story. In its shades and nuances, that story reflects instead the figure with a countably infinite number of sides—an apeirogon.
Rami Elhanan is an Israeli whose 13-year-old daughter Smadar was killed by a bomb. Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian, is the father of 10-year-old Abir, who was killed by a rubber bullet idly fired by an Israeli soldier from the back of a jeep. They meet at the intersection of two circles. One is the Parents Circle, a group of people who have lost children in the conflict. The other is Combatants for Peace, made up of veterans and others who are opposed to the Occupation, seeing that it endangers both the occupied and the occupying nations.
Their search for reconciliation does not come from nowhere. Bassam is a student of the Holocaust, able to separate the people from their government, even in the face of daily humiliations of blockades, checkposts and interrogations. Rami and his family oppose their government’s policy of endless expansion. The grief of these men waters a seed that has been planted long before.
The novel reads like long-form journalism, with a scattering of photographs and documentary-style background about avian migratory routes over Israel and Palestine, the geometry of an extraordinary wooden pulpit, Molotov cocktails and Philippe Petit’s highwire walk across the Hinnom Valley with a pigeon in his pocket. McCann introduces elements that he takes up again and again, playing on our feelings. From the memories of the fathers, he resurrects not only the daughters but the multi-sided reality surrounding their absence.
Late in the novel, McCann refers to an experimental opera by Philip Glass that has the effect of “a sort of serenity surrounded by the feeling of being constantly disturbed”. The beauty and the sorrow of Apeirogon has exactly this effect.
—Latha Anantharaman