Author: Fanny Howe
Publisher: Divided
Paperback
One of our books of the year 2024!
Lu says: London-rose dwells on, and thrives with, uncertainty. It’s a work of wandering, driven by the potentialities opened through identitary, geographic and spiritual restlessness - dualities of self/other, moral/theological, earthly/celestial explored throughout. Put simply, the protagonist - unnamed - begins discontentedly working as an error-corrector for institutional grading systems, before finally choosing to leave her job, embarking on a journey from Wales to Paris, to Dublin, Scotland, Birmingham and beyond. Here invoked is an amorphous revolution, one that is emotive, abolitionist, resistant. Fragmented and penned with the gauzy imagism of dreams, Howe’s writing is replete with historical apocrypha, lists, monastic citations and ephemera, in communication with an anti-capitalist and anti-individualist political mode. She expresses, ‘don’t identify yourself with your description of yourself.’ It left me assessing the meaning of work, what constitutes the ‘self’ and the place, and need for, dreaming.