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Breath by James Nestor

February 19, 2025

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Our Ancestors by Italo Calvino

The dog signifies nothing... Now is as good a time as any I suppose to admit that I regularly confuse Italo Calvino with Umberto Eco and when struggling for the name of one of them, invariably come up with the name of the other. What value does this add to a review of either’s work? None whatsoever. I just thought it would pay to be honest up front, so that if I start talking about semiotics, the discourse of literary criticism, or beards, then you’ll know my train of thoughts has switched tracks and is heading for a bridge under construction. Of course, reading the Wiki pages on the two of them (to make sure I was talking about the right fellow) I noticed with some dread that Our Ancestors is one of the best known works of the most translated contemporary Italian writer (at the time of his death) and here I am, trying to make sense of it in my own personal context. Well, I’m always going to be treading down some fool’s heels so why should I care if it’s actually most peopl...

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It was laughter dripping wet with tears. Coloured people's laughter. It’s not something on which I’ve dwelled for any great length of time, conventionally or historically – although it is now creeping around the page edges of the fictionalised autobiography in the shop window of my thoughts thanks to books like Glyph by Percival Everett amongst others – but I am guilty of what Siang Lu calls , “ontological whiteness - where you default a character, if not otherwise specified, as white.” In all honesty, guilt probably isn’t the correct response as it would imply that there is a right and wrong way to imagine the characters in a novel, when matters of culture and nurture and considered, and assuming people are WASPs (like me) is devilment, although bias is perhaps an imbalance at best. I refer you to the chapter in Glyph where baby Ralph states for the first time to the reader that he isn’t white, despite what the reader might assume (leading in my case at least to a notably reverse...

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To be the eyes and ears and conscience of the Creator of the Universe, you fool. In days gone by, when repeatedly pressed about what my favourite book might be, a banal question seeking an impossible and crude reductionist answer to which I was usually rude in response, I would offer Breakfast Of Champions as a pacifier. I first read it in University, and it has, to some degree, influenced how I think and feel about a lot of things. Strikingly, I've never wanted to re-read it. Perhaps I was afraid I'd find fault the second time around and wanted to uphold it as a paragon of meta-fiction. Perhaps, but then I'm a relentless consumer of fiction and was always on to the next consumable work, never having time or inclination to go back. So in the spirit of a more considered and thoughtful phase of my life I decided I wa nted to read something that once made me feel good. I'd clearly not remembered it very well. But before that, I'm amazed I've gone *mum...

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Breath by James Nestor

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