'Slouching' - Book Review
Squire’s confessional tone, paired with a fascinating slew of historical research and multimedia design, grants the reader access to a Europe that feels far more complex and real than any Instagram post could hope to portray. Slouching is at once a diary, a JSTOR article, and a well-loved scrapbook.
Backpacking through Europe is an inevitable box to check off on every twenty-something’s bingo card. The experiences, the culture – and as much as we are loath to admit it – the aesthetic Instagram postcards are just some of the highlights that come with roaming the streets of Paris or Berlin.
Slouching: A Field Guide to Art and (Un)Belonging in Europe by Charlie Squire is a diary of sorts, commemorating their six-month trip to 23 cities in Europe, including Lithuania, Poland, Sweden, France, Italy, Hungary and Croatia. Standing at barely 90 pages, Slouching could just as well serve as a travel pamphlet or a scrapbook of film photos. It’s a multimedia delight of text, doodles, photos, and scanned mementos. Ticket stubs, film strips, business cards, receipts. Its homeliness and warmth belies the painstaking curation that putting together a book like Slouching requires.
Squire is most notably known for their publication Evil Female, a home for their personal essays and cultural criticism located on Substack, Gen Z’s equivalent of Wordpress. They also write for magazines such as i-D and DAZED. There is a confessional tone to Squire’s body of work that feels like reading someone’s journal, or better still, occupying a corner inside their mind and watching them go about their day. Slouching is their most personal work to date, allowing the reader to practically sit in Squire’s pocket as they navigate life in Europe.
“It is June and the weather is beautiful and the sun sets late in the evening. Charles and I eat beautiful food and drink gooseberry wine and in four days I will turn twenty-three years old. I’m taking lots of film photographs and laughing a lot; I am filled with a deep and constant sadness that fills the bottoms of my lungs.”
At times this ‘diary-esque’ tone is raw and authentic; at others, it comes across as navel-gazing. Toeing the line between being honest and being self-indulgent is no easy feat, and there are moments during Slouching that cross over into the latter. Unless the reader is neck deep into a parasocial relationship with Squire, there comes a point where their musings and blow-by-blow accounts of their afternoons in Italy become somewhat tiring. There is only so much we can care about someone we don’t know.
On the other hand, Squire’s candid authorial voice and reflections on mental health and identity imbue Slouching with a greater level of depth than most travel books can boast. Their admissions of anxiety over train tickets or their confusion in trying to understand their own Jewish heritage isn’t something found in tourism advertisements or vacation snapshots. Rather than shying away from the things we don’t usually see, Squire shines a spotlight on them and brings them to the fore.
It is also one thing to visit famous sites and tick them off an itinerary. It’s quite another to engage with them using a critical eye, interrogating the biases and history that shape them. Partly a dissection of European and colonial history, Slouching is just as informative as it is introspective, discussing topics from the ideological underpinnings of IKEA to the narratives being peddled by the Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights in Vilnius:
“I can’t stand to stay in the Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights for much longer. I have a headache and a stomachache, the result of intense sadness and anger at a government museum performing something very close to Holocaust denial, and the fact that Charles and I are the only people in the museum that seem to care.”
But Slouching truly shines through in its point of difference from other travel books. Squire’s confessional tone, paired with a fascinating slew of historical research and multimedia design, grants the reader access to a Europe that feels far more complex and real than any Instagram post could hope to portray. Slouching is at once a diary, a JSTOR article, and a well-loved scrapbook. If you’re going to travel Europe from your armchair, it may as well be in Charlie Squire’s shoes.
Thank you to the author for providing a proof copy for review.