Mailing List


Rose McLaren

Rose McLaren is an artist in London.



Articles Available Online


Talk Into My Bullet Hole

feature

July 2015

Rose McLaren

feature

July 2015

‘Someday people are going to read about you in a story or a poem. Will you describe yourself for those people?’ ‘Oh, I don’t...

feature

May 2014

Art Does Not Know a Beyond: On Karl Ove Knausgaard

Rose McLaren

feature

May 2014

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle has an oddly medieval form: a cycle, composed of six auto-biographical books about the...

Chris Power’s first collection of short stories, Mothers, is peopled by the restless – forever walking, running, travelling, holidaying, city-hopping, doing anything not to stand still They are displaced, impulsive, sometimes desperate The narrator of one story summarises it as ‘the lightness of being far from home, the pleasure and terror of being free to do as I liked’ It carries the logic, though decidedly not the tone, of picaresque: travellers, like orphans, are liberated to situate themselves from scratch, living without ready-made definitions   This is certainly true of the three linked ‘Mother’ stories that structure the collection, which concern Eva: first remembering her childhood in Sweden; then travelling along the Costa Blanca; finally married with a daughter of her own She leads an unhappy life in the shadow of her parents’ death, and travel becomes a way of outrunning her problems, though even here she is following her own mother around Europe, carrying around her guidebook and allowing it to fall open at spine-cracked pages, as if consulting the mother’s spirit ‘It seemed to help if I kept moving,’ she confesses finally ‘Whenever I stopped moving everything became… too much’   Young Eva, in ‘Summer 1976’, reads food into everything: stacks of LPs are liquorice, the air stands thick as jam or greasy with a coming storm On a dare, the boy who lives next door throws an apple into one of the windows of their apartment block, where it bursts against the wall (But does she have to be Eva, and does it have to be an apple, so that the story drags around with it the creaking weight of the Biblical malum malum?) Later, after her mother’s death, her taste for life seems to dull She inherits her mother’s mute desperation; boys are now men, but they embody the same tension between threat and attraction Later still, tethered to a marriage and a daughter of her own, she loses all energy: stuck in one place, with no water running over her gills, she is reduced, depressed and couch bound   Listless and withholding, Eva is an unusual character to give the

Contributor

August 2014

Rose McLaren

Contributor

August 2014

Rose McLaren is an artist in London.

The Prosaic Sublime of Béla Tarr

feature

Issue No. 6

Rose McLaren

feature

Issue No. 6

I have to recognise it’s cosmical; the shit is cosmical. It’s not just social, it’s not just ontological, it’s really huge. And that’s why we...
Stalker, Writer or Professor? Geoff Dyer's Zona and Genre

feature

February 2012

Rose McLaren

feature

February 2012

‘So what kind of a writer am I, reduced to writing a summary of a film?’ wonders Geoff Dyer half way through Zona. Such...

READ NEXT

fiction

January 2016

Dimples

Eka Kurniawan

TR. Annie Tucker

fiction

January 2016

Moments ago, the woman with the lovely dimples had been shivering, utterly ravaged by the evening, but now her...

Art

April 2017

'Learning from Athens'

Robert Assaye

Art

April 2017

The history of Documenta, a quinquennial contemporary art exhibition founded in the German city of Kassel in 1955, is...

Interview

May 2011

Interview with Alison Klayman

Shepherd Laughlin

Interview

May 2011

Until his arrest in Beijing on 3 April as he boarded a plane to Hong Kong, Ai Weiwei was...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required