Review_ Axiomatic
- elmrinigonzalez
- Oct 26, 2018
- 2 min read
Published_ May 2018
Author_ Maria Tumarkin
Publisher_ Brow Books
What is Axiomatic about? Or rather, what is it not about? OK, I’ll help…It’s about real people, real stories and getting so close to them that you start to lose sight of yourself and only see the person in front of you. A process whereby the humanity of the interviewer fuses with that of the interviewee, until it is all a deeply personal experience. That’s how Maria Tumarkin described her latest book Axiomatic when she spoke at a panel talk at the Wheeler Center on the 3rd of October, 2018.
It’s a gut feeling, an approximation to what happens after the aftermath, a sort of aftermath of the aftermath. The book closely follows the journey of a number of women, some experiences intertwine at a deep tissue level, and others end up meeting each other along the many knots in their narrative strings. Suicide as a phenomena is interrogated and it’s deep effects loosely mapped across the micro-experiences of schools, families and their communities. The failures of the criminal justice system are spoken of through the voice and eyes of a community lawyer. Vanda, who passionately talks about the individuals that are repeatedly chewed up and spat out into the depths of the system. In the process we get the honor of meeting their fleeting stories and seeing them as individuals, their humanity treated with an icy tenderness.
Unapologetic and larger than life Vera travels from post-war Poland to Australia in a trajectory that seems to coil itself like a snake into its own memory, shedding the events of a whole full life. A parade of steel-spirited women grace these pages, who time and time again defy the labels society pins on them. Women who define themselves for who they want to be and somehow, their trajectories follow.
This book is raw, thick and complex but agile in the way it shifts from microscopic to macroscopic vision, travelling through vertical and horizontal time in its storytelling. It also has a thick skin and a certain self-deprecatory attitude about itself, it doesn’t care about neatly packaged words or what you believe to be right or wrong. It doesn’t give a damn. This is not a book to be picked up lightly, but to be held in the full glory of its uncomfortableness and challenging perspectives.
Oh, so…what’s it about? It’s about death, love, loss and grief but apart from all those things, its a work (of) process, where all these words are unpacked, undone and filtered back through each other.
L.E.G
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