1This volume continues a series of works edited by J.-M. Ganteau and S. Onega, and one of its key strengths lies in how it builds on their previous scholarship. Over the course of two decades, the editors have meticulously collaborated on a number of essay collections (8 in total according to the introduction) that constitute a wealth of resources to examine how contemporary literature in English engages with notions of trauma, recovery, attention and care. This collection upholds the same level of rigour in the argument, made remarkable in the solidity of the contributors’ developments, the carefully chosen themes and notions as well as the relevance of the theoretical framework judiciously selected to address the most pressing contemporary questions regarding how literature helps us think about ethics in general, and the ethics of care in particular.

2The contributors form part of a European network of researchers, with academics based in Spain (6), Malta (1), the UK (1), France (2), Italy (1), and Turkey (1), giving a cross-cultural perspective on the Anglophone world. However, and probably because the book forms part of a series of similar ventures, it perhaps gives insufficient information about what “contemporary” might mean—in the sense of when it begins or when it ends, but also in the underlying assumptions about its coherence, or lack thereof—, nor are potential newcomers to Ganteau and Onega’s territory illuminated as to why Anglophone narratives should be treated as having different, distinctive characteristics from a more international, comparative approach: both questions remain undiscussed in the text. However, this is not to suggest that the book on the whole and the introduction provided by Ganteau and Onega are, in any way, lacking in theoretical background and forays. The 13-page introduction sets the tone of the collection by delving into theoretical references that consistently return throughout, providing a coherence rarely achieved in collective works: the books on attention and precarity by Yves Citton, Nathalie Depraz, Judith Butler, alongside the most canonical references to Levinas, Certeau, Ahmed and Ganteau are contextualised and rephrased so as to give the appropriate knowledge required to study the dynamics underpinning the reflections of each chapter; the introduction is conceived as a solid overview of how these concerns have been conceptualised and how these notions can be applied in contemporary narrative theory. The politics and political context in which attention and inattention emerge might however have been more clearly identified. The structure of the book is divided into four parts: “Frames and Readers,” “Historical Invisibilities,” “The Forces of Inattention” and “The Natural World.”

3This collection will undoubtedly constitute a reference in the field for students, scholars and PhD students interested in addressing these issues which dovetail with ecocriticism, feminism and questions of class and race—although race is hardly touched upon in the case studies discussed, except for the Gypsy community, and is undiscussed as an element of systemic precarity. Given the specificity of each chapter and the variety of case-studies, I will list the chapters without giving a full account of all of them, choosing instead to extract some particularly relevant elements in their argument so as to invite potential readers to read these chapters for themselves.

4The first part opens with a chapter entitled: “‘The Thing was to make yourself invisible, she said,’ Jon McGregor’s Reframing of the Norms of Perception of Working-Class Women in So Many Ways to Begin.” In it, Susana Onega uses the notion of “metamodernism” developed by Vermeulen and den Akker, which she defines in the following quote: “an oscillation between modernist and postmodernist concerns with neither surpass nor dominant” (sic.15). This proves a useful tool to analyse and categorise McGregor’s work, leading Onega to propose that his novel offers “an overriding preoccupation with the loss of communal bonds and the isolation and commodification of the self” (18). This frames an argument that enables Onega to further the analysis of this novel by also focusing on the writing of history as transformation of the past and the production of alternative perspectives, an approach inspired by Benjamin’s work (34).

5In “Attention to what? The Poetics, Ethics and Attentional Economies in Dave Eggers’ The Parade,” Miriam Fernández-Santiago posits that this novel needs to be looked at from the perspective of a renewed criticism of capitalism, in which the economy’s superabundance no longer relies so much on the manufacturing of goods or the exploitation of materials but on the circulation, development and excessive production of information. This, she explains, following Richard Lanham, accounts for the difficulties we are facing in our relation to the physical world and the way we attend to it. Lanham’s analysis frames the author’s argument because it is not solely a theoretical work of cultural significance, but also a theory of rhetoric and style, easily applicable to the study of a literary text. Here again, the word “oscillation” (41) is used as a way of thinking about the entanglements, often dysfunctional, of the physical world, our attention to them and our media-based connection to nature and other people, seen as potentially dangerous to how the world is experienced. In this chapter, the novel studied prompts readers to think about how this oscillation may work towards greater attention to the physical world (41): “The demand for human attention in the information economy of the twenty-first century is so high as to transform any available leisure time into labour time for the production of human attention” (42). Fernández-Santiago argues that in showcasing an obvious move from experimentalism towards more realistic forms, Eggers’ novel begs for an analysis of what she calls “the attentional apparatus,” which is based on his poetics and ethics of attention. By constantly challenging what care might mean and how the ethics of care might emerge, the novel, Fernández-Santiago concludes, forces readers into a dynamic of attention because the latter is never fixated and care therefore can never be thought of as an easy operation: “In the digital era,” Maggie Jackson argues, “our beguiling technologies increasingly work to undermine our focus and the human capacity for care that so much depends on it” (53).

6Katia Marcellin writes an article about “Interstitial Ethics–Attending to Frames of Intelligibility in Harry Parker’s Anatomy of a Soldier.” In this chapter, Marcellin paradoxically takes the example of a novel whose main protagonist, Barnes, presents himself as failing to experience vulnerability itself, an experience that, she argues with Depraz and Butler, is steeped in British ideals of power, courage and stoicism in the ranks of soldiers. Marcellin points out that the experience of vulnerability is made absent, or invisible, and the threat of death is thus reconfigured. All of this contributes to foreclosing the possibility of empathy; put differently, this means that care is made impossible because of the focaliser’s incapacity to turn his attention to an other that is not symbolised. Marcellin uses Butler to make sense of the social context marked by the self-attributed power of the British state, which Barnes represents, and concludes that the novel replicates a process by which some lives are made valuable or not. Towards the end of the argument, Citton is mentioned to bring forth the notion of how joint care can help alleviate the suffering caused by inattention.

7Merve Sarikayay-Sen in “Attending to the Victims of (In-)Visible Violence: Elided Potentialities Revisited in Claire Keegan’s Small things like these” turns to historical fiction. She starts by showing how this type of fiction has become a trend among contemporary women writers, who seek in it “the imaginative space to create different, more inclusive versions of history” (this is a quote from Wallace, 3, quoted p.79). The novel invites readers to reconsider the norms of attention that have been analysed from different academic perspectives so far, by revealing the dynamic between attention and inattentiveness. Attention is regarded by critics as the medium that establishes relationality and connectedness—and the reference to the less-quoted work of Enrico Campo is much welcome. His argument enables the author to conclude: “selfish concerns vanish, nothing exists except the things which are seen, a process made possible through ‘unsentimental, detached, unselfish, objective attention’” (64).

8In “From Shrouded Presence to Impactful Mentorship–Drawing Attention to the Romani Housewife in Mikey Walsh’s Gypsy Boy,” Alejandro Nadal-Ruiz brings forward a much-overlooked community. As the author says, “Gypsies constitute a massive transnational diaspora of communities evincing the inclination to itinerancy” (95). This represents a welcome change from the essentially white authors that have been discussed up to this point. The readers’ curiosity is further heightened when the author asserts that Gypsy identity is far from being the central concern of the text, because this autofictional account is also one that questions gender and sexuality, specifically in a community often defined by its traditional approach to family and moral values. The character’s sexuality is presented as a sign of dissent that cannot fail to catch the reader’s attention. In a strategy of gradual decentring, Alejandro Nadal-Ruiz studies the representation of Gypsy identity in general before turning to the autofictional novel by Walsh, in which the mother’s role in shaping the individual’s subjectivity is highlighted. Thus, the article itself shows the benefit of paying attention to the texts we read, lest the singularity of experience be made invisible in the general (mis-representation of certain communities: : “As underprivileged subjects attentive to each other’s ordeal, Mikey and his mother are cognisant of the bond between care and vulnerability. Their awareness of such a link may translate into an attention economy” (102). Alejandro Nadal-Ruiz does not solely rely on what constitutes the main body of theoretical works used in the rest of the collection; he also quotes Berenice Fisher and Tronto to remind us that the ethics of care is also the ethics of action and agency. This article paves the way for one of the central articles of the collection, both because of its focus on “minor literature” and the theoretical and political forays it offers.

9“Creating a scene: Minor Literature and the Ecologies of Critical Attention” is a chapter written by Ivan Callus from the University of Malta. For me, this chapter is one of the most thought-provoking in the collection, a central piece perhaps because its scope goes beyond a case-study and can therefore help us think through the notion of (in)attention more broadly, but also because it seeks to contribute to a debate about how canons are constituted. The chapter looks at the systemic processes of inattention in literary criticism, thereby shifting our attention inward, towards that which escapes our attention as literary critics and which postcolonial studies have sought to bring to the fore. Callus refers to Deleuze and others in order to raise the question of what a small or minor literature is, might be or rather how it is defined despite being rarely interrogated in relation to questions of attention and care. In particular, Callus uses Marlon James’s attention to “Island Literatures” to invite us to seek “compensatory attentions” (116) through the analysis of minor literatures’ language, contexts and other such unseen elements.

10This seminal chapter is followed by: “Surveillance and (In-)Visibility: Reading Jenni Fagan’s The Panopticon through an Ethics of Attention” by Angela Riviera-Izquierdo; “‘I can’t be silent and invisible any longer’: Reorienting Attention and Care in Jan Carson’s The Last Resort” by Paula Romo-Mayor; “The Ecology of Attention in Inga Simpson’s Where the Trees Were” by Bárbara Artizti, and “Vibrant Matter, Polyphony and the Ecology of Attention in Sarah Moss’s Summerwater” by Angelo Monaco.

11I would like to finish by looking at another solid chapter that deserves full attention because it offers a slightly different argument and enables critics to think about care more critically than perhaps other chapters which seek to uncover how the dialectics of attention/inattention operates in specific cases. In “The Ethics of Carelessness: Inattention in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never let me go,” Alice Bennett uses critics of attention, such as Tronto, but she also looks at the difficulty of that celebrated and expected caring attitude in terms of its reciprocity, need and choice, starting with this quote: “Caring about involves becoming aware of and paying attention to the need for caring” (Tronto 16). Her first argument lies in re-affirming the connection between care and feminist theory, and the necessity to recognise that care is consistently devalued, which forces us sometimes to try and avoid observing the notion with a critical eye. Bennett writes that: “Care is romanticised, flattened, and abstracted from capitalism, patriarchy, and the state, there can be no liberatory politics around it” (184). By choosing to work on Ishiguro’s text, which gives voice to a “carer” of a frightening kind, given that their role is to accompany organ donors in a dystopian world where some have been cloned to provide organs in later life, she seeks to work on care as possibly steeped in regimes of “violence and oppression” which, paradoxically, leads some to seek emancipation and freedom in carelessness and inattention. In order to understand this, one needs to resist the tendency to regard care from the perspective of the rhetoric of the capitalist economy, where notions of resilience and discipline may instrumentalise attention to achieve productivity and structure, if not performance. The novel, according to Bennett, finds in the possibility of inattention the potential for an ethical force which reminds us that any engagement with care must also be related to an awareness of its limits. Never Let Me Go is thus shown to offer alternative possibilities “beyond participating in coerced acts of caring that ultimately facilitate the system of donations” (196). Bennett concludes with the painstaking analysis of two obsessive scenes that show the cracks in the system of attention as a system of oppression and power.

12This volume therefore offers a wide range of case-studies on the renewed question of (in)attention in its confrontation with the ethics of care. It cannot be stressed enough that this is a collection whose coherence enables readers unfamiliar with some of the case-studies to find inspiration for larger questions, as well as a resource to think critically about a notion that may at times be reduced to a limited view of good intentions as inherently ethical practices.