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Kevin Brazil
Kevin Brazil is a writer and critic who lives in London. His writing has appeared in Granta, The White Review, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, Art Review, art-agenda, Studio International, and elsewhere. He is writing a book about queer happiness.

Articles Available Online


Alvaro Barrington, Garvey: Sex Love Nurturing Famalay

Art Review

October 2019

Kevin Brazil

Art Review

October 2019

The unofficial anthem of this year’s London Carnival was ‘Famalay’, a bouyon-influenced soca song that won the Road March in Trinidad & Tobago’s Carnival...

Essay

October 2018

The Uses of Queer Art

Kevin Brazil

Essay

October 2018

In June 2018 a crowd assembled in Tate Britain to ask: ‘What does a queer museum look like?’ Surrounded...

‘What use are eggs on their own?’ is a question that resounds through Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs, a capacious, contrary novel about pregnancy which is inflected with anti-natalist ideas Initially asked by the narrator Natsuko’s sister, the question takes on a new urgency as Natsuko approaches forty She has no real doubt that she wants a child, despite being asexual and single, and facing pressure to follow up on her successful first novel Breasts and Eggs tackles the way she justifies this desire to herself, made near-impossible by the strictures of contemporary Japanese patriarchal society But Kawakami’s primary concern is not the experience of mothering, even as it recalls in scope and subject recent novels such as Sophie Mackintosh’s Blue Ticket and Sheila Heti’s Motherhood More radically, Kawakami wants us to think not only about giving birth, but about the very experience of being born   Breasts and Eggs, translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd, takes its characters and setting from a novella initially published in 2008 (and awarded Japan’s prestigious Akutagawa prize) We first meet Natsuko as a 30-year-old Osakan writer living hand-to-mouth in Tokyo, receiving a two-day visit during an overbearing summer from her older sister Makiko and her silent 12-year-old niece Midoriko, whose diary entries about the travails of puberty and sex education interweave with Natsuko’s narration Makiko – who works in an Osaka hostess bar and is worried about the effects of ageing on her employability – has come to the city to explore options for cheap breast augmentation, her obsession forcing a wedge between her and the other characters In the second half, set ten years later in 2017, Natsu procrastinates over her second book, while researching options for artificial insemination Her sexual identity is her biggest obstacle, emotional and practical: what right does she have to a child, she wonders, as an asexual woman who refuses the structure of normative coupling? Her research leads her to Aizawa, an advocate for non-anonymous donation, which is illegal in Japan, and his girlfriend Yuriko, a survivor of childhood sexual abuse The two encounters prove

Contributor

July 2018

Kevin Brazil

Contributor

July 2018

Kevin Brazil is a writer and critic who lives in London. His writing has appeared in Granta, The White Review, the London...

Nora Ikstena's ‘Soviet Milk’

Book Review

August 2018

Kevin Brazil

Book Review

August 2018

Soviet Milk by Nora Ikstena opens with two women who cannot remember. ‘I don’t remember 15 October 1969,’ says the first. ‘I don’t remember...

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feature

June 2014

Hoarseness: A Legend of Contemporary Cairo

Youssef Rakha

feature

June 2014

U. Mubarak It kind of grows out of traffic. The staccato hiss of an exhaust pipe begins to sound like...

Art

Issue No. 11

Sarah Jones

Sarah Jones

Art

Issue No. 11

A series of photographs by the acclaimed British artist Sarah Jones is published in The White Review No. 11. 

feature

March 2016

Behind the Yellow Curtain

Annina Lehmann

feature

March 2016

Notes from a workshop   At first, there is nothing but a yellow curtain at the back of the...

 

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