Reader's Digest: March 16, 2024
The most arresting book I have read in recent months is Lara Pawson’s unclassifiable non-fiction, Spent Light. I’m not sure I could explain what it’s about and it’s better to arrive without preconceptions, anyway. But among its themes are the coexistence in our world of domesticity, sex, and unendurable violence.
It’s a rare book whose prose elicits slasher-movie jump-scares. Spent Light does it with descriptions of household objects: an electric toaster, a toilet, a wooden broom. The narrator speaks to a second person, “you,” complicit throughout. The book made me wonder whether, as I turned the final page, I would discover that I was already dead.
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