Afternoon of a Faun
Afternoon of a Faun, book review By James Lasdun W.W. Norton & Company, 2019 The copyright says it all. It’s complicated. These times. Making it even more difficult to unpack a complicated story. More like meta fiction, which ends with the assumed election of Hillary Clinton over her Republican opponent Donald Trump. The last scene in the novel is a living room gathering of friends watching the last debate together with cheers: “He’s going down!” Who is HE, who are WE? The universe keeps expanding in a wave of self-incrimination. What part do we play, have played in the sequence of events leading up to now? I’m of course thinking of . . . children in cages, anti-Semitic attacks, the depths of despair raging over society, people thinking it’s okay to vandalize the Maggie Daley Cancer Survivor Wall, violence against women. Social media hate. The toxic mix making up the news of just this morning . All of us contribute. You can read the culpability in Afternoon of...