What we’re reading: writers and readers on the books they enjoyed in March
In this series we ask authors, Guardian writers and readers to share what they have been reading recently. This month, recommendations include a searing poetry collection, a brilliant history of dancefloors and unputdownable novels. Tell us in the comments what you have been reading.
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Victoria Adukwei Bulley, poet
I have endless admiration for artists whose work transcends the borders of disciplines, so I was stunned by Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa’s debut poetry collection Cane, Corn & Gully, published by Out-Spoken Press. Through a rigorous blend of choreography, poetry and historical research, Kinshasa has constructed a body of poems that listen for and revivify the physical movements of the enslaved women of Barbados’s past. It is a book of searingly virtuosic ancestral reverence and healing, a recalibration of the terms on which we listen for those whose lives were reduced to property. In doing this, much in the spirit of M NourbeSe Philip, Kinshasa exorcises the dead from the bounds of that monstrous category, a liberatory intervention that restores their agency and dignity.
In a similar manner, Ordinary Notesby Christina Sharpe (out this April) has stayed with me since I first read an advance copy. Sharpe’s previous work In the Wake: On Blackness and Being has become a kind of critical touchstone, a reference point for considering what the stakes are for Black life and cultural work, and the kinds of refusals that are necessary in order to engage truthfully with a past that is not past at all. Ordinary Notes builds upon the autobiographical foundations that Sharpe’s In the Wake opens with, comprising hundreds of entries of various lengths. Both individually and in their totality these entries exemplify what it looks like to care and be cared for, to mother, to be mothered and to mourn fiercely, and at all times to bear witness: to behold and be held by what beauty persists even within the enclosure of an anti-Black world.
• Victoria Adukwei Bulley is thewinner of the 2023 Rathbones Folioprizefor poetry for her debut collection,Quiet (Faber £10.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
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Safi Bugel, Guardian writer
My book of the month is easily Emma Warren’s Dance Your Way Home: A Journey Through the Dancefloor. Part social history, part love letter, it digs through the individual and collective powers of dancing via the lens of different subcultures and scenes. We’re transported from Anglo-Saxon churchyards up to late 2010s jazz jams in Deptford via reggae dancehalls, Chicago house sets, New York’s ballroom scene and grime and dubstep nights. There are detailed descriptions of dance moves, music styles and soundsystems, as well as the wider political contexts, from gentrification and ever-increasing club closures to hostile policing and door policies. Here, dance is taken seriously; it’s about more than just hedonism and letting loose, but also community, self discovery, health and history.
This is not just a book for devoted clubbers and professional dancers: Warren also explores the importance of dancing round the living room as a new parent, taking up space as a middle-aged woman and making sense of dyspraxia through movement. The depth of research is fascinating, but it’s written by a fan as much as an expert. Statistics and laws are bolstered by Warren’s own feelings and stories, offering a warmth and authenticity that could only be achieved by someone who has spent many hours on various dancefloors.
The bulk of Dance Your Way Home was written during the height of the pandemic, when collective and public dancing was off limits, and that sense of longing is felt. But despite the wistfulness, and the journeying across place and time, the book does not overindulge in nostalgia. It’s a living history that also looks forward, imagining a future where dancing and movement are valued – by schools and healthcare professionals, by property developers and the government. It’s also a polite but firm call to arms: to protect dancefloors and the opportunities they offer at all costs.
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Henry, Guardian reader
I found Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton impossible to put down. It contains wonderful characters and a fascinating political commentary on New Zealand’s political failings, as well as an ultimate moral question around how power is shared in society. Brilliant – 10/10!
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Cath, Guardian reader
I am reading Sarah Winman’s beautifully crafted story about loss, love, war and the polar opposite cities of Florence and London, Still Life. If I had to describe the best embrace I’ve ever had in written form, this book would be it. Contrasting perfectly the greyness and smog of London’s post war East End with the colourful beauty of Florence and Tuscany, Winman is taking me on a journey with characters so beautifully crafted that I can almost feel their triumphs, losses and loves as they experience them. I usually find myself racing to the end of books to finish them but I’m taking this slowly as I honestly can’t bear to finish it. And if that weren’t enough, there’s also a talking parrot!
factual flaws in the story of Montañez – in short, that he may not have invented Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.
For Affleck and the makers of Tetris, though, no one is talking wholesale invention (bar the odd Moscow car chase). Instead, at least at first, you are simply asked to unplug your sense of irony, before relaxing with two industrial underdog stories, financed by Amazon (Air) and Apple (Tetris).
Such is the first rule of cheerful movies about corporations. You don’t talk about the corporations. Instead, in Tetris, Nintendo is really a support act to Egerton’s Rogers, the lone wolf Dutch-American developer who championed the game. And while Nike is more prominent in Air, our hero is the kind of square peg who barely gets a security pass: Sonny Vaccaro, played by Damon, a paunchy basketball guru pushing Nike chief Phil Knight (Affleck) to go all in on the young Michael Jordan.
Here at least, Rogers and Vaccaro are the Spider-Man meme come to life: identical one-offs, twin outsiders, gatecrashing meetings and the system, staking it all on their gut. “Sometimes you gotta say fuck the rules,” Henk declares, and Sonny would agree. (It can be hard to watch either film without sensing powerful gusts of over-identification from Affleck and Tetris producer Matthew Vaughn.)
By now, the nostalgia is cranked so high that we have passed through the 80s and landed in the Frank Capra 1930s, when little fellas with big ideas were the best of the US. And the bad guys are as obvious as the villainous Mr Potter in It’s A Wonderful Life. In Tetris as in life, Robert Maxwell is reekingly corrupt. In Air, the sadsacks of the board stifle risk-taking. Between Buddhist aphorisms, Knight pines for the old Nike when he was free of such dead losses.
Frankly, old and new can both feel old with these movies: the only woman with a proper role in either is Michael Jordan’s mother, Deloris (played by Viola Davis). But the lesson is clear – capitalism goes wrong only in the hands of crooks and squares.
The nostalgic glow is warm indeed: an ode to a time when free spirits such as these had a seat at the corporate table. The optimistic gleam is dazzling: all hail a smarter, fairer, funner capitalism. On-screen, the Air Jordan trailblazes a profit-sharing model with star athletes, presented as a victory for street kids everywhere. Tetris gives us nothing less than the last days of Soviet communism, Egerton playing air guitar to The Final Countdown while Muscovites chant for Levi’s.
Utopia was at hand, and you got it down at the shops. Not everyone loved the same brand. Quite the contrary. As per DeLillo, deep nuances of identity were conveyed in a preference for a Nike swoosh over the three stripes of Adidas. But everyone loved brands: shiny blank slates. Consumer choice was a happy alternative to ideology or nationalism. As the giddy teenager played by Paul Whitehouse in the 90s sketch comedy The Fast Show would have put it: “Isn’t capitalism brilliant!?!”
Which is why the clock stops when it does in these movies. And why BlackBerry is the outlier; the ghost at the feast. The star of that story, Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel), is yet another misfit genius. But his arc is different, eaten alive by the corporate world. The timeframe, too, is telling. While the setting of 1996 is dressed up with period detail, it also nudges us into the age of the internet: the here and now, to which technology, capitalism and our ids delivered us.
Cue a montage of the dystopian weirdness of the last decade. Brands would come to mimic people, firing shots on social media, and people turned into brands, every post on Insta affirming core values and strategic alignment. Do that well enough and you got to be an influencer, paid to hawk tat for one vast corporation on a platform owned by another.
But wait! An urgent voice would now surely argue that the spirit of Rogers and Vaccaro lives on in plain sight. Sadly, that voice belongs to Elon Musk, who clearly sees himself as the madcap-savant of modern business, but whose idea of comedy is layoffs conducted with laughcry emojis.
All told, who wouldn’t feel a pang for the time when capitalism was meant to provide ever-cooler gizmos, rather than endless new ways to immiserate us? How bittersweet to recall expressing our inner selves in the supermarket, now the own-brand defines ongoing hard times. (And all this before AI destroys half the jobs in Europe and America. Good grief, maybe even mine.) This was not the future we were promised in 1990 – the moment Air and Tetris now freeze in time, like a cure for what ails us.
You may need to check your receipts. Because the snag is, what these movies are selling never existed. Both are set in an 80s since rebranded as a clueless, power-chord paradise, where even the business dudes were rad and gnarly. But Affleck and Vaughn are old enough to know reality was more complex: the age of Thatcherism and Reaganomics was also one of broken unions and mass unemployment, a thrill ride of recessions and market crashes. (Not that it compares to Russia’s free market experience in the 90s. Tetris wisely cuts beforehand. It would make quite a blooper reel for the closing credits.)
Yet a lot about 80s capitalism has endured as well. Aside from appearing in three feelgood new movies, Nintendo, Nike and Frito-Lay also share a record of allegations of “union-busting” and harsh treatment of staff and workers. But Flamin’ Hot doesn’t highlight Frito-Lay’s so-called “suicide shifts”. And Air finds Nike in the vanguard of progress. It even notes Knight’s $2bn in charity donations.
Unmentioned, however, is his backing of organised campaigns against tax increases for high-income individuals; or the company’s long history with sweatshops; or the fact that young Americans would be attacked and even killed for their Air Jordans, tragedies that have been linked to Nike’s marketing and pricing.
Would a good name for all this be movie-washing? Ask a branding expert. But a film is defined by what it leaves out of the frame. And nostalgia is less about memory than forgetting. It helps us forget the present, by helping us forget the past. Remember that, when, in 40 years, another batch of fun-packed movies appears to tell the quirky, uplifting stories of Yeezy and Uber – and, yes, Musk too.