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Rachel Kushner: telexes from the 20th century

By Guy Somerset In Books

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‘Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” Rachel Kushner has a nice twist on this Gustave Flaubert line in her novel The Flamethrowers, where, in Italy between the wars, one of her characters starts developing a new motorcycle, while his Futurist friends “went to the track to race their cycles but less and less often, as they were too busy writing poems about motorcycle racing, busy making paintings of the velocity they’d felt. None was interested in generating actual speed …” Kushner’s own life is ...

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