Overall it's interesting but not terribly illuminating, and didn't quite manage to convince me that it needed to be a book rather than a feature-length essay in a magazine or online. More compelling is the story of Fox embarking on his own journey across the seas – as a passenger on a cargo ship. But I didn't feel they were as clearly connected to the idea of limbo as Fox seemed to think, or especially interesting in their own right.
I feel a bit bad about saying so, as they're obviously personal to the author. Traditionally it was a funeral dance, performed at wakes in Trinidad and Tobago during the 19th century it's said to have originated on slave ships travelling between Africa and the Americas.įox links his musings on limbo together with stories about his older brother Karl, who left home to sail the world in 1985 and has rarely revisited the UK since. Most interesting for me were the section about ghosts (of course) and the section about the limbo dance, which explains its origins. It sets out to explore the importance of inbetween states and interstitial spaces, providing along the way a brief cultural history of the concept of 'limbo'. From Thomas Aquinas to radical behavioural experiments, from creative constraints to the social horrors of THE TWILIGHT ZONE and Get Out's SUNKEN PLACE, LIMBO argues that there can be no growth without stagnancy, no movement without inactivity, and no progress without refusal.
LIMBO is an essay about getting by when you can't get along, employing a cast of artists, exiles, ghosts, hermits and sailors - including the author's older brother who, in 1985, left England for good to sail the world - to reflect on the creative, emotional and political consequences of being stuck, and how these are also crucial to our understanding of inspiration, flow and productivity. Fusing family memoir with a meditation on creative block, depression, solitude, class, place and the intractable politics of our present moment, Dan Fox draws upon his experiences as a writer to consider the role that fallow periods and states of impasse play in art and life. In a world that demands faith in progress and growth, LIMBO is a companion for the stuck, the isolated, delayed, stranded, and trapped.
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