Twist
My first job at a magazine included tasks like fact checking, proofing, as well as administrative minutiae such as taping an assortment of an editor’s handwritten taxi receipts to paper so that I could photocopy this collated masterpiece and then FAX it to someone in “corporate.” (🎶 It was the 90s. 🎶) Sometimes I was asked to research/find obscure facts and datapoints to include in this front-of-the-book section. Once, I was asked to find some factoids about “content,” which was a bit hard for me to wrap my head around. Like…information?! One did not bandy around words like “data” or “content” the way we do now. And as much as I enjoy wading in the theoretical in novels, I can tend toward literalism in day-to-day stuff: Why and how does gasoline *actually* make my car go? Why and how does cell division *actually* = life? To the point, I did not understand the assignment. (However, one of the great mysteries of my childhood — how do credit cards work? — eventually solved itself. Folks, it’s just plastic. But I genuinely thought there was like a motherboard in them. [But how do motherboards work?])
Information that zips and speeds and whizzes by: What does that actually look like? Colum McCann’s latest novel — Twist — takes place mostly in South Africa, as Anthony Fennell reports on a story about Conway, who repairs the submarine communication cables that transport info. Or content, as we would say now. Fennell: “It still astounded me that nearly all our information travels through tiny tubes at the bottom of the ocean. Billions of pulses of light carrying words and images and voices and texts and diagrams and formulas, all shooting along the ocean floor, a flow of pulsating light. In tubes made from glass. In glass made from sand. In sand that has sifted through time.” Indeed. (But huh?)
When you think of it, books do this too — in their own, more concrete way. Beyond the obvious — the plot mechanisms or word choice — *how* does a novel’s prose reach a reader effectively? Symbols to letters to sentences to become pieces of content that maybe pierce one’s heart or burrow into one’s mind. An author has a plan, but an unseen mystery remains. Kinda fascinating.
originally published on instagram