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The Pajiba June 2023 Book Recommendations Superpost!

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Books | June 30, 2023 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Books | June 30, 2023 |

Pink Flamingos 1.jpg

The Facemaker by Lindsey Fitzharris

It’s been a solid month for non-fiction in my house. I kicked off things this June with The Facemaker, which recently received a paperback release in the UK. We talk rather derisively about plastic surgery these days, mostly seeing it as a mark of vanity, but its origins lay in ground-breaking facial reconstructions following the violence of the First World War. As mankind’s abilities in warfare became more technically sophisticated, so did our means of mass murder and injury, For soldiers who survived the battlefields but returned home with disfigurements, the best many of them could hope for was life as a recluse.

Historian Lindsey Fitzharris dives into the story of Harold Gillies, a pioneering surgeon who established one of the world’s first hospitals dedicated entirely to facial reconstruction. With his team of doctors, nurses, artists, and dentists, he found ways to give these men back their identities. Her work is detailed but accessible, delving into not just the work of Gillies but the many soldiers who came to him with injuries that had been deemed unfixable by most experts. Losing a limb could make you a hero back home but losing your face meant being shunned by society, including your family and friends. Fitzharris is sensitive but still intrigued by the gory details (which, let’s be honest, is half the reason you read a book like this — and yes, there are pictures.) The focus here is on the humanity of these men, both injured and fixers, rather than the viscera it’s so tempting to leer at. Give it a go for an unconventional Summer read, but be warned: it will make you hate the word ‘flaps’.

The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act by Isaac Butler

What do you think of when you hear the term ‘method acting?’ Do you think of Leonardo DiCaprio eating raw bison liver for The Revenant or Lady Gaga maintaining an Italian accent for several months while making House of Gucci? This specific brand of acting and the mythos surrounding it has become a parody of itself in the public eye, overtly fetishized by Oscar voters and prizing PR-friendly theatrics over the craft of performance. Of course, this isn’t really method acting. As Isaac Butler details in his book, The Method, the history behind this technique is long, storied, and highly influential.

Sparing no detail, Butler offers a dense exploration of the origins of the Method, starting in 19th century Russia and the work of Stanislavsky, an actor who sought to find the truth on-stage in lieu of the creative default of the time. As this new kind of acting made its way across the Atlantic, new teachers took up Stanislavsky’s mantle, including rivals Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler. As cinema took over from theatre as the main platform for performance, the hunt for realism in acting continued, evolving as actors delved deeper into the psychological realms of character. The path from Chekhov to Jared Leto isn’t a smooth or straight one, but Butler is adept in revealing how interconnected everything is. What is defined as ‘truth’ in acting has changed, but there is still a commonly shared agenda, whether you choose to use your own experiences for inspiration or dive head-first into months of research to prepare. The Method does an excellent job of demythologising a concept that has become weighed down by tedious displays of self-flagellation and casual workplace abuse. It’s a must-read for anyone who loves performance of all kinds. The book ends with the work of Robert De Niro, so I would love to see Butler explore the past three decades of acting in greater detail.

The Queer Film Guide by Kyle Turner

Pride is coming to a close but there’s always time for queer cinema. Critic Kyle Turner’s The Queer Film Guide is a casual but wide-reaching collection of essays with recommendations of movies old and new, familiar and esoteric. I was pleasantly surprised to be introduced to a number of films I had never heard of, alongside favourites like Pink Flamingos and Brokeback Mountain. Through this collation, Turner creates the beginnings of a canon and reminds us that queerness has been present in cinema for as long as the medium has existed. Suck it, culture wars.

Barn 8 by Deb Olin Unferth

Janey is an auditor for the U.S. egg industry, stuck living in a hopeless small town with the father she barely knows following her mother’s death. She sees no hope in her future, no chance of reclaiming the life she had before she moved there. Then she catches her colleague breaking the rules to document some of the cruel conditions the battery hens are kept in. Soon, they’ve decided to mount a heist and liberate as many chickens as they possibly can in one night.

There’s a lot of ambition and imagination behind Barn 8. Unferth is ferociously pro-animal and anti-farming industry, and she tackles this agenda with quirky left-turns and an ensemble of ragtag underdogs bound together by their dissatisfaction with life. There’s a lot of fun in this book, and a lot of heart too. It takes unexpected twists, such as the point-of-view of a rogue chicken. What holds Barn 8 back from being great is its erratic pacing and the ways that the characters often feel indistinct from one another. Unferth shoots for the moon, and while her accuracy is uneven, there’s much to appreciate in a book with such vast ideas among its pages.