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A review by dan_the_write_stuff_melbourne
Axiomatic by Maria Tumarkin
5.0
Brow Books have it right there in their mission statement: to publish works of literature that ‘are always exceptional, urgent and bold, from authors who are looking to invigorate and challenge readers.’ This is exactly what they’ve done with Maria Tumarkin’s fourth book, Axiomatic. Writing in a cohesive, conversational, stream-of-consciousness style, Tumarkin isn’t afraid of hard topics, not worried about people who are ‘easily shocked’—she doesn’t sugar-coat the discourse around youth suicide, for example, but she’s written in a way that makes it all easy to digest.
Axiomatic is a book that contains so much. It’s about survivors—not necessarily about the strong, but perhaps the resilient, the malleable—the people who seem built for this life, telling stories of people who perhaps were or are not. Tumarkin has arranged the voices of survivors so that they may help others survive, or at least help others deal with survival.
Axiomatic is about the victims of life; it’s about the people who have no system that works for them, ‘broken vessels containing, spilling … those who came before us.’ It’s a book about high school suicides; about people the justice system fails, people whose cruel past has marked them for life. It’s about those who time condemned to repeat the fate of those who came before them. Axiomatic is about time and its influence on trauma, growth and change; about the way that time rules us all, past and future converging and enacting on the present, and Tumarkin leads us along deftly as she contemplates and concludes, recounts and remembers and learns.
Axiomatic is a weave of objective reportage and personal stakes, a texture of beauty and pain. It is boundary-pushing, genre-defying, and, most of all, it feels so important as a work of non-fiction that it begs to be read as widely as possible.
Axiomatic is a book that contains so much. It’s about survivors—not necessarily about the strong, but perhaps the resilient, the malleable—the people who seem built for this life, telling stories of people who perhaps were or are not. Tumarkin has arranged the voices of survivors so that they may help others survive, or at least help others deal with survival.
Axiomatic is about the victims of life; it’s about the people who have no system that works for them, ‘broken vessels containing, spilling … those who came before us.’ It’s a book about high school suicides; about people the justice system fails, people whose cruel past has marked them for life. It’s about those who time condemned to repeat the fate of those who came before them. Axiomatic is about time and its influence on trauma, growth and change; about the way that time rules us all, past and future converging and enacting on the present, and Tumarkin leads us along deftly as she contemplates and concludes, recounts and remembers and learns.
Axiomatic is a weave of objective reportage and personal stakes, a texture of beauty and pain. It is boundary-pushing, genre-defying, and, most of all, it feels so important as a work of non-fiction that it begs to be read as widely as possible.