58 Facets: On law, violence and revolution (Marika Sosnowski, MUP)

‘This is a strange book,’ Marika Sosnowski writes in the acknowledgements of 58 Facets, and she isn’t wrong. Part poetic inquiry, part legal ethnography and part dreamscape of inherited trauma, 58 Facets resists neat classification. Its subtitle – On law, violence and revolution – gestures toward academic terrain, but it reads more like a literary essay, threading memoir, theory and anecdote into something close to a meditation. Traversing Nazi Germany to revolutionary Syria, and from Gaza to Java, Sosnowski probes how lawful violence morphs into authoritarianism – and how these transformations linger in bodies, families and bureaucracies. Her own family history is woven into the text, most notably in the figure of her great-uncle Charles, once a commander in Gaza for the Haganah, a precursor to the IDF. There’s admirable ambition here, and a searching intelligence. Yet the book’s broad temporal and geographic range can feel diffuse, and the opacity of the prose at times detracts from the author’s more substantial philosophical claims. Sosnowski freely acknowledges that her connections aren’t always scientifically grounded; instead, they’re intuitive, mnemonic, almost dreamlike. The result is often arresting, though occasionally elusive. Fans of Maria Tumarkin will find much to admire in this unique approach to trauma, memory and history. Readers seeking more structured argumentation may feel unmoored. Still, 58 Facets is a bold, prismatic work of nonfiction – less concerned with answers than with opening space for reckoning. As the title suggests, Sosnowski’s lens refracts the past in the present.  

Books+Publishing reviewer: Melissa Mantle is a bookseller with a master's degree in literature. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

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