Our new episode is up! Annie & I discuss Axiomatic by Maria Tumarkin. 🎧. This is Annie‘s tip to win the Stella Prize, to be announced tomorrow night. 😃🤞🏼 A bracing read - we couldn‘t put it down.
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Do you agree with Annie? Who‘s your tip to win The Stella Prize?
pickA bracing, confronting joy of a book. Tumarkin looks at how we as humans & society deal with the past: facing up to traumas (or not) & how it shapes us. I love her direct style, honesty & deadpan humour. It‘s poetic, unadorned & disarming - the personal stories grip you & she shines a light on issues like suicide & Holocaust trauma with a curiosity & openness that brings the reader into the experience, seeking truth. Thought-provoking.
pickSuch a challenging book but worth it. Deserving and demanding of more than one read. Tumarkin drags the reader through investigations of trauma, suicide, nature v nurture, migration (forced and voluntary) and the nature of resilience and survival. Experimental in form, this work is carefully constructed while feeling like stream of consciousness. On the #2019StellaPrize longlist
‘The past shapes the present ‘ - they teach people that in schools and universities. Shapes? Infiltrates more like, imbues, infuses, it is invisible this past, it is has not solid, an odourless, colourless chemical agent bouncing around in the lungs, crackling in the spaces between us, in the air the culture breathes in, out.
Axiomatic | 
