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...

Reading Jesse Ball’s new novel feels like being hypnotised, or like having your heart broken – but really it feels like both at once It’s a dreamlike road-trip of a book, more Kafka than Kerouac, in which a terminally ill widower and his young son, who has Down syndrome, travel across a nameless continent in an indeterminate past They journey from a town called A to a town called Z, taking a bizarre census, marking each resident they encounter with a tattoo But beside or beneath this story – which has the feel of a fable or parable, transpiring outside the specificities of time and place – something else is being constructed: an act of remembrance or restitution   Census opens with – and reading it is framed by – a nonfictional foreword to the meandering fiction that follows In it, Ball explains why he wanted to write the book (‘I felt, and feel, that people with Down syndrome are not really understood’) and how he decided to do it (‘I realised I would make a book that was hollow’) In the opening line, we learn that the book is about – or rather, says Ball, ‘around’, the distinction is important – a real person, on whom the boy in the novel is based: ‘My brother Abram Ball died in 1998’ We learn that Abram had Down syndrome, and that when he died, aged 24, he had been quadriplegic for years As a boy, Jesse assumed that he would live with and care for Abram when they were adults, in a relationship ‘very similar to that of a father and son’, until death intervened The power of Ball’s foreword is connected to the simplicity with which it is written, which, in turn, highlights an irony: that a loved person has died tragically young can be stated in a handful of words, but to express the transformations wrought by that loss would exhaust the capabilities of language One reading of Census is that it offers, or attempts to offer, an artistic consolation for that inconsolable loss It’s the closest Ball can get

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

Art

Issue No. 10

Patterns

Christian Newby

Art

Issue No. 10

feature

October 2015

War is Easy, Peace is Hard

Alexander Christie-Miller

feature

October 2015

At around midday on 19 July, Koray Türkay boarded a bus in Istanbul and set off for the Syrian...

feature

April 2012

Oradour-sur-Glane: Reflections on the Culture of Memorial in Europe

Will Stone

feature

April 2012

Que nos caravanes s’avancent Vers ce lieu marqué par le sang Une plaie au coeur de la France Y...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required