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Rose McLaren

Rose McLaren is an artist in London.



Articles Available Online


Talk Into My Bullet Hole

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July 2015

Rose McLaren

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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...

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May 2014

Art Does Not Know a Beyond: On Karl Ove Knausgaard

Rose McLaren

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May 2014

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

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 22 October 1944,’ says the second, ‘but I can reconstruct it’ They can only reconstruct what happened because these are the days on which they were born Birth reminds us that we are always dependent upon another to know the truth of who we are, something few of us ever come to terms with These two women are never named: the first, born in Riga in 1969 in the early years of Leonid Brezhnev’s rule over the Soviet Union, is the daughter of the second, born when Riga was liberated from the Nazis at the end of the Second World War This mother is also a daughter, born to a woman who resolved to forget the independent Latvia of her youth, and a father who refused to forget that Latvia condemned him to the gulag Soviet Milk consists of these two women telling their stories in short alternating sections, manifesting in its form the intimacy and distance of what the daughter calls their ‘two parallel worlds’   This is one among many instances of the ‘Soviet absurdity of parallel lives’ the daughter experiences while growing up, as she alternates between public enthusiasm for Soviet rule and private rebellion through studying Latvian poetry The absurdity ends when her generation re-achieves independence: ‘the return of their mother – the land of their birth’ But her mother cannot escape absurdity by being reunited with her nation, because absurdity is the condition of her existence ‘My birth obliged me to be alive: an absurd happenstance’ Unlike her daughter, identification with a nation does not provide an answer to the question that haunts her life: ‘There were so many who more than anything had wished to live but hadn’t been born Who decided this?’   Ikstena’s novel, which is lucidly translated by Margita Gailitis, was written as part of a series called ‘We Latvia The 20th Century’, comprised of thirteen novels telling the history of twentieth-century Latvia Ikstena has been publishing novels, essays, plays

Contributor

August 2014

Rose McLaren

Contributor

August 2014

Rose McLaren is an artist in London.

The Prosaic Sublime of Béla Tarr

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Issue No. 6

Rose McLaren

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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

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February 2012

Rose McLaren

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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...

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Interview

August 2016

Interview with Brian Evenson

J. W. McCormack

Interview

August 2016

There are at least three Brian Evensons, all of them EXCEEDINGLY IMPROBABLE. First, there’s Brian Evenson, the prolific author of...

fiction

Issue No. 8

The Lady of the House

Claire-Louise Bennett

fiction

Issue No. 8

Wow it’s so still. Isn’t it eerie. Oh yes. So calm. Everything’s still. That’s right. Look at the rowers...

Essay

Issue No. 20

Notes on the history of a detention centre

Felix Bazalgette

Essay

Issue No. 20

Looking back at Harmondsworth as he left, after 52 days inside, Amir was struck by how isolated the detention...

 

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