The Mussel Feast by Birgit Vanderbeke
trans. Jamie Bulloch
Review by Alex Mee
I studied chemistry for a while, the subject that I imagined would most quickly lead me into mad science and thence world domination and battles of wit with an alcoholic misogynist in a nice suit. One element of the syllabus that was extremely perplexing, which has stuck with me longer than any of the information that my teacher’s tried to impart, was the beneficial untruth. Every time I leveled up, from GCSE to As and then A Level, it was revealed that everything that I had been told up until this point was simply a useful but utterly inaccurate approximation of reality. Remember how we convinced you that the electrons were little balls that shot around the nucleus, how we made you draw that innumerable times and then you took an exam that tested your knowledge of those little balls? Well you can forget it now. Continue reading
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