The debut of Ana Kinsella, a writer and author of the newsletter the London Review of Looks, Look Here is an ode to London and its public life, arranged according to the seasons and the author’s favourite walking routes.
At its outset, Kinsella’s cascade of observations feels charming but a little vague. “Here we all are, the message seems to be,” she writes, “all of us part of an endless stream of personhood, of possibility.” But as the book progresses it gains in thematic ambition, moving between field notes, interviews and longer passages on walking.
Kinsella’s writing is elegant and a little formal, honed by years of work as a journalist. Her introspection is not of the fashionably raw variety; it is subtle, considered and confident, gradually announcing her presence, her memories and experiences. Material details light up her field notes (“Mare Street: Woman in a long blue gingham dress and Jackie O sunglasses laughing to herself, trying to hide her private mirth and failing.”), and Kinsella herself is a sartorial shapeshifter, one moment using fashion to feel powerful, the next using it to make herself invisible.
Look Here's fragmented structure lends a welcome sense of pace to a book that becomes, much like its subject, a living tapestry
The interview sections, meanwhile, showcase a series of charismatic Londoners discussing their relationship to public space. A fashion designer talks about the vast, voluminous dresses she creates, and what it’s like to wear them on the Tube, while a barrister explains the intricacies of court dress and colour-coded wig bags.
Another strength lies in Kinsella’s ability to give name and description to shapeless, fleeting experiences common to urban life. Passages are devoted to “Going time”, the hours that cities demand one spends on travel and planning, as well as the phenomenon of privately owned public space, those cold, anonymous plazas found in London as well as, increasingly, Dublin. Deep in lockdown, Kinsella records the loss of public space as a writer cooped up in a tiny apartment; walking anywhere in search of escape, her London transforms into a zombie wasteland, a paranoid terrain of masked walkers and neighbours snitching on each other for sunbathing in the park.
Look Here’s fragmented structure lends a welcome sense of pace to a book that becomes, much like its subject, a living tapestry. Arriving, now, as we emerge from hibernation, it’s a celebration of London, its mythologies and possibilities, and a timely, thoughtful study of the ways in which cities shape human life, and vice-versa.
