Dear readers,
Do you know the difference between an astronaut and a cosmonaut? The distinction rests on where the -naut was trained: Cosmonauts hail from Russia and astronauts from the United States, Canada, or Europe. Not China, though: The Chinese version is a taikonaut. If there exists another job with three different names of equally silky mouth-feel, I cannot think of it.
The -naut distinction is one of several vocabulary upgrades you might receive from Samantha Harvey’s “Orbital,” which has taken the books desk by storm. Nobody pays us to get obsessed with specific books all at once; it just happens. (If we got paid, you’d know. Our fingers would be heavy with diamonds.)
To counteract the expansive dreaminess of “Orbital,” I got down and dirty with Ian Penman’s collection of music essays. If you’re hankering to see the likes of James Brown and Prince (among others) treated with the penetration of an X-ray machine and the besottedness of a poet, Penman is your fella.
—Molly
How odd it must be to exist in a place without weather — a place where you can’t enjoy the gravity-contingent relief of flopping onto your bed after a long day, and where what feels like floating is actually the state of free-falling at roughly 17,000 miles per hour. “Orbital” teleports you there, into a space station circling Earth. The novel, which won the Booker Prize in 2024, covers a single day in the lives of six astro-/cosmonauts.
I’ve written about the author, Samantha Harvey, before. Her memoir of insomnia, called “The Shapeless Unease,” is my second-favorite source of meditations on sleeplessness after “Macbeth.” Her debut novel, “The Wilderness,” focused on a man suffering from Alzheimer’s. I mention these entries in Harvey’s back catalog because they highlight her interest in how humans experience time. In the case of insomnia, time queasily lurches and distends; in Alzheimer’s, chronology becomes a bafflement, and in outer space — back to “Orbital” — time is psychedelically warped, with each day containing 16 sunrises and sunsets.
The imaginative routes through which humans conceive of outer space — from Philip K. Dick to “Star Trek: The Next Generation” to “Interstellar” — are always a useful way to map our collective health. Do we look at space with an optimistic gaze? With dollar signs in our eyes? With imperial designs? With despair? I won’t reveal too much about the tone of “Orbital” other than to say it tingles with poignancy.
Read if you like: Spending hours in the NASA image archive, John Wyndham, the films of Terrence Malick, daydreaming.
Available from: A good library, a good bookstore or apparently the shelf of anyone who works at this newspaper.
“It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track,” by Ian Penman
Criticism, 2019
Penman’s book is a journey through all the brows: high, middle and low. He’s among our best living music critics — a man who can pay tribute to Frank Sinatra’s vocal technique while simultaneously acknowledging that young Francis did look a bit like “a semolina dough Mickey Mouse.” (Not that it stopped him from scooping up ladies left and right!)
This volume assembles essays on James Brown, Elvis Presley, Prince, Charlie Parker, Steely Dan, John Fahey and others. Every piece has its exhilarations, but the James Brown is my favorite: a sensitive etiology of a complicated man, it illuminates the music, untangles a knotty personality and sheds light on the (unrelated) mysteries of Brown’s 1) affection for Richard Nixon and 2) PCP-induced decline.
Read if you like: The late, great art critic Peter Schjeldahl; the late, great Gary Indiana; the late, great Manny Farber; Bill Morrison‘s fantastic mini-documentary on the Village Vanguard, called “The Vanguard Tapes.”
Available from: Fitzcarraldo Editions.
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