Triage

In her first book after the celebrated American trilogy, Claudia Rankine returns to offer her most personal and emotionally resonant writing yet. Triage follows the turbulent friendship between two composite characters, the narrator and the theorist, self-identified sisters struggling to define their wounded histories and their shared but separate lives. During college, they invent a game of collapse: every time they see each other, they have to stop and fall to the ground. As their kinship continues on and off for decades, ‘collapse’ takes on new meanings. We see it in the violence of their pasts, artworks depicting couches where someone might ease their exhaustion, the ongoing devastation in Gaza, and the antagonism of their conversation and their love for each other. ‘No matter our posture,’ Rankine writes, ‘we are all among the rubble’. And through that wreckage, Rankine scours the edifice of fact to find the fiction at its core, the lie at the centre of all things. Triage is an argument for the necessity of grieving, the demand for action in our time of relentless loss, and an ode to those complicated but beautiful friendships that we rely on to unsettle us, to make us better.