Book Club: Politics and Literature: Novels for the New Century - „Zusammenkunft“

23.10.2023 - 23.10.2023

For this first session of our book club, we had chosen Natasha’s Brown Assembly, a short début novel of around a hundred pages, internationally acclaimed. We started the discussion by talking about the different translations (and possible meanings) of the novel’s title, which proved to be very fruitful. The brevity of the book made it possible to have a very in-depth discussion of its various aspects, both formal (narrative fragmentation) and political (or its open refusal of politics). The discussion touched on Britain’s colonial heritage, as well as class differences and intersectional feminism at the heart of the story. The illusion of integration and its doomed-to-fail injunctions comes up against irreducible racism, pernicious class contempt and ineradicable sexism. A divide among the participants very quickly emerged in the appreciation of the main character and her decision not to fight her cancer: abandonment that marks the fatigue of a class transfuge who feels at home nowhere, or ultimate resistance in front of the different expectations she is constantly subjected to? Renunciation or self-assertion? The debate remained (and remains) open.