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disassociated's review against another edition
4.0
Interesting narrative structure. Some of the threads were a little difficult to keep track of at times.
jimmylorunning's review against another edition
4.0
axiom: (n) a statement that is regarded as self-evidently true.Self evident? Or just unexamined? Does self evident stand for "passed down from generation to generation without thought"? If you examine it deeper, will you realize it's not self-evident at all? Or that it's not even evident. Or that it's not even true.
Using axioms as an organizing principle, does it work? Does she undress the axioms?
The sections are each an axiom: "Time heals all wounds," "Those who forget the past are condemned to re-," "History repeats itself," "You can't step in the same river twice," etc.
These beliefs we hold self evident by general consensus so that we cannot see the truth that would otherwise be evident if we didn't hold beliefs at all. To truly see without preconceived notions. The particularities that prove the sayings false time and time again we choose to ignore. We say: it's an outlier. Or: it can't happen to us.
These are not the only axioms she explodes. Some aren't so pithy, just beliefs without a saying:
Like the belief that helping people out a little is better than none at all. But in reality, it could do more harm:
“But what if the something good men and women do is largely nothing masquerading as a something, or if the something’s worse than nothing because it plucks people out of their own world then dumps them, with fewer resources, less hope, once the good people collapse in their inevitable moral exhaustion? Helping someone in unspoken expectation of their often impossible rehabilitation is frequently worse than not helping.”Or the belief that children are innocent:
“Innocence—talking about that as the thing defining of children, and which trauma rips out of them… I like how an Australian philosopher, Joanne Faulkner, deals with innocence. Three big problems she says: first it’s a self-serving adult fantasy; also it makes adults give up on children believed to be no longer in possession of their innocence; finally it stops children participating in an ethical and civic life.”The very last book I read, [b:Edinburgh|272433|Edinburgh|Alexander Chee|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1438828929l/272433._SX50_.jpg|264139] by Alexander Chee, also spoke to this topic:
“Do you remember what it was like, to be young? You do. Was there any innocence there? No. Things were exactly what they looked like. If anyone tries for innocence, it’s the adult, moving forward, forgetting. If innocence is ignorance of the capacity for evil, then it’s what adults have, when they forget what it’s like to be a child. When they look at a child and think of innocence they are thinking of how they can’t remember what that feels like.”She's interested in examining trauma, obviously, but also in how institutions like schools, prisons, and the judicial system break down when dealing with individuals with trauma. They don't treat them like individuals. Institutions don't have compassion. She's also interested in cycles repeating themselves both in history (wars, violence) and in terms of personal histories (a suicide in the family means your chances of committing suicide go up).
Her tone reminds me of my friend Cid in its no bullshit manner of laying down the truth and judgements. Some would say she puts in a little too much of her own opinion, but I really enjoyed her perspective. I liked that this wasn't some no-skin-in-the-game type journalism.
Some references here I didn't get, and may be aimed more at an Australian audience. I was on vacation (I know this isn't vacation reading material, like maybe the LEAST vacation reading material out there, but I'm weird, I always read shit that's not vacation material on vacation. I also read Edinburgh and that one's about childhood sexual abuse) and did not have wifi access (thus no Google to Google the references).
GR review by Katarina: "the words sometimes feel like they're tumbling artlessly out of her mouth, sentences sometimes lack the punctuation I might expect, it feels mid-conversation; and yet you know that this book took many years of reflection and re-reflection."
I felt this too. There's no scene setting. Sometimes almost like we're reading directly from her journalist notebook. She starts in the middle of a thought. At first it was frustrating but once I got the hang of it, I liked it. You have to work to connect all the dots. And it felt like less clearing of the throat, less artifice (while still being artistically composed).
Like many others here, I didn't "get" the last chapter. It seemed buried in the author's own personal history, and not enough was shared for me to know what the hell she was talking about. It's ok, it was the shortest chapter, and the book didn't need it.
GR review by Amanda: "what Axiomatic lacks from a visceral perspective is hope. Fictious happy endings are overrated, but hope is not. Tumarkin puts forth unattainable Utopian standards both for society and its participants in order to fix its ills and therefore Axiomatic is ultimately nihilistic."
I'm highly suspicious of that word, unattainable. I was having this same thought while reading [b:A Map to the Door of No Return|379994|A Map to the Door of No Return|Dionne Brand|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1174322794l/379994._SY75_.jpg|369800] by Dionne Brand (another excellent non-vacation read that I read during vacation!) when she was talking about how we turn away from those "on the edges" of society--and that is that if this pandemic has taught me anything, it is that nothing is unattainable.
If cities and whole countries can grind to a halt for this pandemic, then that means that if enough people cared about something to the point where we think it's unacceptable, then we can stop everything and address it. Doesn't mean we'd solve it, but at least we're not living with it like it's normal. If we decided that certain things are unacceptable--not just the pandemic, but
- poverty
- child abuse
- climate change
just to name three of many, then we can begin to address it in a humane way. A lot of what is "unattainable" is only so because it has not been attained (or we have not wanted to attain it badly enough as a society).
Also, a lot of these problems could be eased, maybe not solved but eased, by better public policy, more compassionate institutions, and more social safety nets. That's a first step, at least. Reducing suffering is not an all or nothing proposition. We can't say just because we can't fix everything, we might as well not try at all.
cbalaschak's review against another edition
5.0
"This is the story sentenced to constant retelling, about how people are born into things, and date thinks intergenerationally."
adrianasturalvarez's review against another edition
4.0
It has taken me longer to write a review of this collection of essays than it took to read them. Tumarkin creates an emotional throughline that is compelling all while building a devastating point, summed perfectly by something an old prof of mine used to say, "All loss... it's all loss."
Take this passage, from History Repeats Itself:
As the collection's title suggests, Tumarkin's project takes aim at the self-evident truths we derive from history and reform and our relationship to progress and, of course, trauma. The profound dialectics each essay is structured with create both a fascinating prose style and a fit form for each argument, which tends to arrive at conclusions not dissimilar to the state of a sweater when you pull on a thread to investigate where it ends - a clump of thread and no sweater. It is disorienting and with each essay I was left with feelings of anxiety, depression, and grief. Oh joy! So yes, not exactly book you get in the mood for but at the same time, living in the world in this age had me primed for a good devastation.
I highly recommend this to anyone struggling both with the mechanics of essay writing (these will jolt you out of any funk) and for any reader who struggles, or wants to struggle, with a crisis of meaning in our post-recovery movement era.
Take this passage, from History Repeats Itself:
"How about all those people for whom their life does not feel precious? Why not is often the easy bit to get: they were abused, abandoned, beaten to the point of forgetting they had a body, betrayed, humiliated, caught out by their socioeconomics like a mole in a spring trap. They were not loved or not loved enough. Lost someone, witnessed something, got into drugs or drink early, missed having their mental illness diagnosed, all of it, none of this. A harder question is can the feeling your life's worth shit be fixed, whether from the outside or inside out? Can it? All the services offering legal aid, food, counseling, employment (tedious employment), shelter, they cannot get close to this worth-shit feeling. I do not mean the needs they take aim at sit at the bottom of Maslow's pyramid (let's blow up the dumb pyramid). I mean the feeling's impervious to being messed with, it is too deep and diffused, a mystery even to its host, it is precognitive, it is metaphysical, both. And when the feeling is there it skews the survival instinct, instills that take-it-or-leave-it sense. Force of gravity's just too weak to pull you in. To keep you in. People, plans, debts, windfalls. Intangible stuff that holds you in - just not strong enough to stop you giving it away. 'The weightlessness of giving up.' I came across this expression in Kristina Olsson's [b:Boy, Lost|17406924|Boy, Lost|Kristina Olsson|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1361493880l/17406924._SX50_.jpg|24246574]." - pg 108
As the collection's title suggests, Tumarkin's project takes aim at the self-evident truths we derive from history and reform and our relationship to progress and, of course, trauma. The profound dialectics each essay is structured with create both a fascinating prose style and a fit form for each argument, which tends to arrive at conclusions not dissimilar to the state of a sweater when you pull on a thread to investigate where it ends - a clump of thread and no sweater. It is disorienting and with each essay I was left with feelings of anxiety, depression, and grief. Oh joy! So yes, not exactly book you get in the mood for but at the same time, living in the world in this age had me primed for a good devastation.
I highly recommend this to anyone struggling both with the mechanics of essay writing (these will jolt you out of any funk) and for any reader who struggles, or wants to struggle, with a crisis of meaning in our post-recovery movement era.
caitelizabet_h's review against another edition
4.0
Brilliant use of language and writing style. The content varied from heavy and almost unbearable to read, whilst maintaining a dialogue between reader and author. Would recommend but with a “heartbreaking” content warning.
emmkayt's review against another edition
3.0
Non-fiction, somewhat like an essay collection, except the author is trying to do something less conventional and weaves round and in and out her tale, offering unusually structured sentences and sections. The focus is trauma, histories, how what people experience in this regard shapes their interaction with the world and their core self (or doesn’t). Tumarkin was born in the Ukraine and moved to Australia in her teens, now teaching creative writing in Melbourne. She speaks with people affected by adolescent suicides, an older woman who is a child Holocaust survivor, a community lawyer representing marginalized clients, a woman who went to prison for kidnapping her grandson. I sometimes connected firmly with it and was very struck by some passages and portions, but also found the oblique, in-and-out style frustrating.
Some quotes:
“Perhaps one way of putting it is that many of Vanda’s clients live their lives on a highway where they are repeatedly hit by passing trucks. As they are bandaging their wounds, cleaning them out with rainwater, putting bones back into sockets, another truck’s oncoming. A backlog of injuries functions not unlike a backlog of grief, an expression i first heard near the desert in the Kimberleys where backlog describes the unrelenting holding of funerals on Aboriginal land, leaving the living no time to mourn the dead, creating an imploding paralysis. That is what’s in the tar as well. Most people have a truck going over them at some period in their life. But on a highway you don’t get one or two. You get a convoy. They don’t stop. That’s the point. The recurrence is the point. The point’s the repetition.”
“Certain prototypes assert themselves, usually later in life. And for those who took an oath a long time back to (I do not count myself in this group) under no circumstances become our parents this may feel like a form of possession, or like being possessed. You open your mouth and your mother’s voice comes out complete with your mother’s words. It’s like Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea that every utterance in this world contains in some way all the utterances that preceded it. We contain our parents, doesn’t mean we are them, it means we go from being inside of them to them being inside of us.”
“So this is how it is, I think. Stars rain from the sky like shards of glass. Time makes room for timelessness. Creation is always a catastrophe, a shattering. Everything has already happened. The past does not move through the present like a pointed finger or a shadowy figure in a long cloak. The past is not ‘told you so.’ Not ‘this is how it all began.’ It is a knock on the door in the middle of the night. You open the door and no one is there.”
“[I]n America, America in particular, childhood has for so long been used as self-explanation, or some form of self-diagnosis, and how regularly this verges on a cop-out, personally, culturally, also how blinding such determinism can be, flattening too, like a life’s a by-the-numbers backstory in an undistinguished Hollywood movie. Yet I see as well -took me a while -that of a million things happening to us in Babylon, toddlerhood, prepubescence, some are bound to turn into what Eva Hoffman calls ‘needles.’ Needles that ‘pricked your flesh’ then ‘could never be extracted again.’”
“Survival leaves you knowing both testimony and silence as tainted choices, each riddled equally with despair.”
“A survivor learns how to be alive and dead. A child survivor is a particular kind of survivor: an expert in doubleness.”
Some quotes:
“Perhaps one way of putting it is that many of Vanda’s clients live their lives on a highway where they are repeatedly hit by passing trucks. As they are bandaging their wounds, cleaning them out with rainwater, putting bones back into sockets, another truck’s oncoming. A backlog of injuries functions not unlike a backlog of grief, an expression i first heard near the desert in the Kimberleys where backlog describes the unrelenting holding of funerals on Aboriginal land, leaving the living no time to mourn the dead, creating an imploding paralysis. That is what’s in the tar as well. Most people have a truck going over them at some period in their life. But on a highway you don’t get one or two. You get a convoy. They don’t stop. That’s the point. The recurrence is the point. The point’s the repetition.”
“Certain prototypes assert themselves, usually later in life. And for those who took an oath a long time back to (I do not count myself in this group) under no circumstances become our parents this may feel like a form of possession, or like being possessed. You open your mouth and your mother’s voice comes out complete with your mother’s words. It’s like Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea that every utterance in this world contains in some way all the utterances that preceded it. We contain our parents, doesn’t mean we are them, it means we go from being inside of them to them being inside of us.”
“So this is how it is, I think. Stars rain from the sky like shards of glass. Time makes room for timelessness. Creation is always a catastrophe, a shattering. Everything has already happened. The past does not move through the present like a pointed finger or a shadowy figure in a long cloak. The past is not ‘told you so.’ Not ‘this is how it all began.’ It is a knock on the door in the middle of the night. You open the door and no one is there.”
“[I]n America, America in particular, childhood has for so long been used as self-explanation, or some form of self-diagnosis, and how regularly this verges on a cop-out, personally, culturally, also how blinding such determinism can be, flattening too, like a life’s a by-the-numbers backstory in an undistinguished Hollywood movie. Yet I see as well -took me a while -that of a million things happening to us in Babylon, toddlerhood, prepubescence, some are bound to turn into what Eva Hoffman calls ‘needles.’ Needles that ‘pricked your flesh’ then ‘could never be extracted again.’”
“Survival leaves you knowing both testimony and silence as tainted choices, each riddled equally with despair.”
“A survivor learns how to be alive and dead. A child survivor is a particular kind of survivor: an expert in doubleness.”
elena_lowana's review against another edition
5.0
I really, really enjoyed reading this. Tumarkin had some brilliant insights; I found her style of writing really refreshing. I particularly enjoyed the way she used brackets/parentheses to hold a different form of conversation with the reader, whilst also pulling them through her ideas. The end point of the chapters aren't clear at the beginning, which really worked in this book. It made you want to keep reading. Will definitely reread.
jesslynsukamto's review against another edition
4.0
The essays teetered between reflective streams of consciousness and social commentary, and really engaged with hard hitting topics including teen suicide, child abduction, refugee experiences, and Holocaust narratives. An eclectic, thought-provoking read, also a gorgeous, difficult and extraordinary book that demands deep engagement from the reader (something I ended up not supplying). I feel it would be better consumed in a more dedicated way.