Emergency: Daisy Hildyard

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He recently published, together with Sven Vitse, Affectieve crisis, literair herstel: De romans van de millenialgeneratie (2021; Amsterdam University Press) [Affective Crisis, Literary Repair: The Novels of the Millennials], a study of twenty-first-century literature from the perspective of an affective crisis. I like to think that I would go mad if I tuned into everything, all the time, the squirrel’s heartbeat or the roar of growing grass…. With the help of a marine geologist colleague, she describes the physical experience of a person who is thrown overboard, who encounters deepwater waves and is carried in the wake for a time, who floats and then sinks and drowns.

The theme of being cut off from the world in the present, as the adult narrator, becomes interwoven with your coming-of-age story about a young girl being immersed in nature. But the alternative story that comes out of these carefully verified facts gives a very different impression. Alexievich’s book begins with an extraordinary narrative that is both a passionate love story and a detailed pathology of radiation poisoning. Is this your experience of the world, too, not just your narrator’s, and is this book partly an effort to hold onto that richness of experience in the natural world?

In this you have a basic distrust of language, and of the filtering and prioritizing that it requires.

He describes the bombing raid as a physical event—its sounds, fires, and the waves of pressure—and as with Sharpe’s account, the piecemeal simplicity of this history is oddly unsettling. Like Sebald and Sharpe, Alexievich is attentive not only to the human world, but to how anthropogenic destruction articulates itself on a wide landscape. Inside the silence, he says, we “hear our displacement from the position of auditor: as species we hear what our environment hears—and, in listening for silences in that environment, we hear our own displaced position as auditors within the Anthropocene. This story is narrowly individualist and self-focused, distinguished by separation from nature nature, and many of our stories are hung up on it, but it just isn’t up to the task of exploring what a human life is right now.In this, an account of a bombing campaign, it’s Sebald’s attention to the habits of the flowering lilac, rather than his depiction of charred bodies, that feels out of place.

Only after the civilians were transported out of the Zone did the incident begin to manifest itself to the wider human population.

Her book was published in 2016, and so she was writing and thinking in a political climate different from that of Sebald and Alexievich in the late 1990s.

They had an entirely different understanding of death, encompassing everything: from the birds to the butterflies. Daisy Hildyard is the author of the novels Emergency and Hunters in the Snow, which received the Somerset Maugham Award and a ‘5 under 35’ honorarium at the USA National Book Awards. It is told by Lyudmila, who had, at the time of the explosion, recently married Vasily, “Vasya,” a firefighter. HW: I really admire the bold experiment with form in this novel – the collapsing of past and present and of voice, and the way that seemingly unconnected events run into one another without separation. Maybe it’s in the way I spoke to her, my body and so on, but every articulation has its way and its physical form, words are always placed.I can understand why you would dislike language on these terms, but personally, I’ve never been able to feel it.