HOW TO READ NOW by ELAINE CASTILLO

JEE LEONG KOH Reviews

 

How To Read Now by Elaine Castillo

(Penguin Random House, 2022)

 

BOOK LINK

Elaine Castillo's book of essays How to Read Now features a lit bomb on its cover. By its devastating critique of Nobel prize-winner Peter Handke's fascist sympathies and beloved Californian writer Joan Didion's settler-colonialist views, the book is necessarily blowing up Castillo's relations with certain influential parts of the literary establishment. If you have enough of coddling book reviews that read more like publishing blurbs than literary criticism, you will keenly appreciate Castillo's take-no-prisoners, and razor-sharp, approach to reading these and other white authors. The courage and honesty are undeniable. 

More than attacks on individual authors, however, How to Read Now wants to destroy the harmful ways in which readers are expected by authors and publishers to center white experience: to treat it uncritically as "universal," "existential," and free of political taint, whereas the work of BIPOC writers is treated as mere ethnography, even if sympathetically. White readers are habituated to read BIPOC authors to understand "others" and to read white authors to understand "humanity." The BIPOC reader is often what Castillo calls "the unexpected reader," since white authors do not think that they need to take such a reader into account.

In other ways, How to Read Now is much more than an explosive device. It reads indigenous writers and artists from Aotearoa (New Zealand) with penetrating and moving insight. It reads Taiwanese and Hong Kong filmmakers with a deeply personal yet critical fervor. How to Read Now is also a touching memoir of the author's historical and familial inheritances as a post-colonial Filipina growing up in a small California town among an immigrant, ethnically diverse, and mostly working-class community. It is a powerful perspective from which to dismantle unjust power and to demand better reading.

*****

Jee Leong Koh is the founder and organizer of Singapore Unbound: Imagining a Creative and Fulfilling Life for Everyone, a NYC-based literary non-profit whose projects include Second Saturdays Reading Series, the Singapore Literature Festival in New York City, Gaudy Boy which publishes Asian voices, and SUSPECT, a journal of Asian writing and art. You are invited HERE for more information and sign up for Singapore Unbound's newsletter.