Spent Light — Lara Pawson

Shortlisted for the 2024 Goldsmiths Prize
Chosen as a Book of the Year in the Times Literary Supplement, New Statesman and Frieze magazine

‘Reading Pawson you realise how obedient most writing is, constrained by squeamishness or protocol … Lara Pawson’s writing is brilliant, unnerving and shockingly alive.’
– Miranda France, Times Literary Supplement

‘A woman contemplates her hand-me-down toaster and suddenly the whole world erupts into her kitchen, in all its brutality and loveliness: global networks of resource extraction and forced labour, technologies of industrial murder, histories of genocide, alongside traditions of craft, the pleasures of convenience and dexterity, the giving and receiving of affection and care.
     ‘“Everything in this damned world calls for indignation,” the woman says at one point. All of it’s there, all interconnected, and she can’t stop looking. The likeness between a pepper mill and a hand grenade, for example, or the scarcely hidden violence of an egg timer.
     ‘And what if objects knew their own histories? What if we could allow ourselves to see those weird resonances, echoes, loops, glitches, just as Pawson does so beautifully and unnervingly here?
     ‘Spent Light asks us to begin the work of de-enchanting all the crap we gather around ourselves to fend off the abyss – because we’ll never manage that anyway, the book warns, the abyss is already in us. But love is too. There might be no home to be found in objects, but there’s one to be made with other people. I think, in the end, this powerful, startling book is a love letter.’
     – Jennifer Hodgson

‘I’m flabbergasted by the naked determination on show here, not to say the talent. Page by page, image by image, association by association, Lara Pawson develops a picture of the world that you won’t be offered anywhere else: stark, unremitting, brilliantly formed and written.’
     – M. John Harrison

‘A shocking book. Lara Pawson’s merciless and exquisite prose adorns everyday objects with the violence of history – the savage comedy by which living creatures have become broken, petrified things. I will never look at a toaster or a timer, a toenail or a squirrel, the same way again.’
     – Merve Emre

‘A narrative that presents as fragmentary, bordering on stream-of-consciousness, coheres into something deeply affecting – the accumulation of moments of pain, beauty, and epiphany refracted through quotidian things: a timer, a toilet, a toaster, a squirrel, a toenail. Memories abound that can feel confrontational in their bluntness but never gratuitous. Stark, shocking imagery is tempered by the gentle sense of love that pervades the narrative. Pawson confronts horrors, bodily and otherwise, to offer perspective on a relationship […] that offers stability, intellectual companionship, and tenderness. Spent Light coalesces into a Wunderkammer of treasures, memories and mundanities that the reader is invited to view – sometimes repellent, often alluring, always resonant and compelling.’
      – Andrew Clarke, Irish Times

‘At first Spent Light seems to be about metaphor or simile. Each object in the narrator’s daily life is like, or reminds her of, another object, or a darker purpose for the same object. The timer used for boiling eggs is the same brand as the one used by IRA bomb-makers, and the narrator finds herself longing “to wind it up and fix it to the underside of our neighbour’s car … just to listen to the sound of the tick-tick down there, just to get a taste of what it is to create fear”. […] These aren’t metaphors or similes but material connections, ways in which objects form networks. The material culture of England does in fact contain blood, in every literal and metaphorical way; usually we get by not thinking about it. […]
     ‘Spent Light is, obviously, not comfortable reading, but it is wild, bold writing in league with perfectly clear thinking, and while disturbing it is also, in a satisfyingly dark and absurd way, comic. Shelve it with Lucy Ellmann, Miriam Toews, Jenny Offill; brilliant, disillusioned women in absolute control of glorious prose.’
     – Sarah Moss, Guardian (full review here)

‘The book’s sprawling thought process leads us across land and time, to the likes of Gaza, Angola, Northern Ireland, South Africa, Iraq, central Europe, and elsewhere throughout the 20th and 21st centuries […] Maybe the book offers a means of objectifying trauma –literally so. Or perhaps it offers a way of understanding life and death, human cruelty and suffering. […] The book is also a kind of love story. […] Beyond the concrete, the book reaches into the absence in which things exist.
    ‘The book is beyond doubt affecting. It invokes in the reader a sense that reality as she knows it is a private hallucination; a series of connections she has chosen to make – and could remake, reimagine, if only she looked again.’
     – Niamh Donnelly, Financial Times

‘Pawson, who explored Angola’s forgotten massacre in her first book, In the Name of the People (2014), writes with a grotesque beauty. […] Pawson has created something very much her own here. It’s not fiction, it’s not non-fiction, it’s not memoir and it’s not an essay. What it is is a reminder that everything in this world is connected and that stories are everywhere, even in objects we might otherwise overlook.’
     – Susie Mesure, Spectator

‘Pawson has a facility for sensory detail and a bracing candour about her sometimes disturbing desires … Violence is encoded everywhere … But there is also humour and love in this remarkable book, and an appreciation of the life in everything.’
     – Tom Gatti, New Statesman

‘This book, I suppose in keeping with its tripartite classification, is very difficult to summarize succinctly. Pawson’s prose is sharp and unsparing. It moves swiftly, shifting from unlikely observation to shocking image to expression of affection and on again. It possesses a certain terrible beauty, to reference Yeats, but it is also very human and often very funny. It does not fail to remind us of the potential darkness that lurks inside each one of us, yet it also celebrates the capacity to look to the light – in nature, in love, in the ordinary things we cherish, and in the memories we hold dear. A compelling read, it is one that sits uneasily, strangely, and wonderfully in a light of its own making.’
     – Joseph Schreiber, roughghosts