London Review of Books

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‘Above all,’ Douglas Stuart writes in the acknowledgments to Shuggie Bain, his first novel, ‘I owe everything to memories of my mother and her struggle.’ The American cover has a black and white photograph of a boy and a woman in bed, their foreheads touching in a maternal embrace. (On the British cover, a boy sits on a post that looks not unlike a...

Amid the tearing of hair and the rending of garments, the busted teeth and the vomit, a picture of a gutted Glasgow emerges. It’s the dark side of Thatcher’s Britain, another reason for the invited comparison with Alan Hollinghurst, whose portraits of the era attend to its more glamorous precincts. But the scope of the book never really widens beyond Agnes’s drinking. The city is glimpsed, as are Shuggie’s emerging artistic sensibilities and sense of his own sexuality, but only just.

To Die One’s Own Death

Jacqueline Rose

What is left of the inner life when the world turns more cruel, or appears to turn more cruel, than ever before? When it reels from inflicted blows – pandemic, war, starvation, climate devastation or all these together – what happens to the fabric of the mind? Is its only option defensive – to batten down the hatches, to haul up the drawbridge, or simply to survive? And does that leave room to grieve, not just for those who have been lost, but for the broken pieces and muddled fragments that make us who we are? Barely six months after the outbreak of the First World War, on Christmas Day 1914, Freud wrote to Ernest Jones to lament that the psychoanalytic movement ‘is now perishing in the strife of nations’ (the two men were on opposite sides in the war). ‘I do not delude myself,’ he wrote. ‘The springtime of our science has abruptly broken off . . . all we can do is to keep the fire flickering in a few hearths, until a more favourable wind makes it possible to light it again to full blaze.’ At a time of pandemic like the one we are living in today, is there room for anything like the complex reckoning with life and with death that is the unique domain of psychoanalysis?

The End of the Plantocracy

Pooja Bhatia

The movement for Black liberation made its world-historical debut in August 1791 when ten thousand slaves in the north of Saint-Domingue rose up and laid waste to sugar plantations. Within three months, the numbers involved in the insurrection had grown eightfold. Sugar production almost ceased. Fortunes burned. Planters fled, and some were killed. By 1794, the rebels had compelled France...

From the blog

‘The fish rots from the head’

Musab Younis

13 November 2020

It might seem bizarre to blame the murder of the French schoolteacher Samuel Paty on a nebulous conspiracy of leftist academics, given that the perpetrator, Abdoullakh Abouyedovich Anzorov, was an 18-year-old who had never been to university. But earlier this month in Le Monde, 100 French academics gave their backing to Jean-Michel Blanquer, the education minister, when he responded to the murder with a flood of invective against universities. ‘Islamo-leftism is wreaking havoc,’ he said. Paty’s murderer had been ‘conditioned by people who encourage’ a type of ‘intellectual radicalism’ and promote ‘ideas that often come from elsewhere’, i.e. from across the Atlantic. ‘The fish rots from the head,’ he added darkly. Blanquer was following the example of the president of the republic.

At the Pace Gallery

Trevor Paglen

Daniel Soar

The usual four white walls, but in each corner a screen, surveilling the gallery. Normally the display is pale pink but at times it flicks to grey, indicating that someone somewhere is watching. It could be you, at home, clicking on the website for Octopus (2020), the installation project by Trevor Paglen that allowed the stay-at-homes, the voyeurs, the disabled, the bored, the ill, the...

Danez Smith and Jericho Brown

Kevin Okoth

Danez Smith’s prose poem ‘Dear White America’, published in Don’t Call Us Dead (2017), brought Allen Ginsberg’s ‘America’ into the present and gave it a more urgent register: ‘we did not build your prisons (though we did & we fill them too). we did not ask to be part of your America … i can’t stand your ground. i’m sick...

Diary

Alone in Venice

Colm Tóibín

Suddenly, there was nothing to complain about. No cruise ships went up the Giudecca Canal. There were no tourists clogging up the narrow streets. Piazza San Marco was often completely deserted. On some bridges a few gondoliers stood around, but there was no one to hire them. Instead, dogs and their owners walked the streets, with no one pushing them out of the way. People greeted one...

In the latest issue

19 November 2020

Poem

‘Oh What A Night (Alkibiades)’

Anne Carson

Plato’s Symposium prelude.A symposium was usually a gentleman’s drinking party. This is an unusual one. It has been going on for hours with no drinking. The participants agreed at the outset to forego wine in favour of entertaining one another with speeches in praise of love. Phaidros, Pausanias, Eryximachos, Aristophanes and Agathon have spoken; Sokrates is just subsiding to...

Eclectic Imitators

Tobias Gregory

Writers imitate their precursors, consciously or not. Nobody starts from scratch. Even the Homeric poems had traditions behind them. To write is to enter a conversation, to make your own reading into a usable past, to choose the literary company you seek to join, or to beat. A writer, Saul Bellow said, is a reader moved to emulation. The question is not whether to imitate, but what to...

The Breadwinner Norm

Susan Pedersen

Fathers sat down to a kipper or a boiled egg at breakfast (and gave one favoured child the top); their dependants ate porridge. Kind fathers sometimes shared tidbits; others avoided the whole drama and ate alone. It’s true, of course, that many men were doing hard manual labour: they needed those hearty meals. But these be haviours were also about status. Even men in sedentary jobs ate eggs and bacon while their children ate bread and dripping.Mothers were different. Mothers fed you, sent you to school, decided when you’d go to work – and, if you were a girl, pulled you out of school when you were needed at home. Mothers ruled every aspect of your life.

From the blog

The BAME Game

Jason Okundaye

20 November 2020

‘Is Dishy Rishi on your side?’ asks a recent attack ad made by ‘One Rule for Them’, aiming to expose the chancellor’s . . .

In Liverpool

Lynsey Hanley

19 November 2020

On 6 November, Liverpool became the first city in the UK to undertake a mass testing programme for the virus that causes Covid-19, with the hope . . .

At the Migration Museum

Daniel Trilling

17 November 2020

On the last weekend before England entered its second lockdown, two slabs of the Berlin Wall were standing on the concourse at Lewisham Shopping . . .

‘The fish rots from the head’

Musab Younis

13 November 2020

It might seem bizarre to blame the murder of the French schoolteacher Samuel Paty on a nebulous conspiracy of leftist academics, given that the . . .

Like Moonlight over Water

Anna Della Subin

12 November 2020

We knew what she would wear. The white pantsuit was waiting for Kamala Harris to take the stage in Wilmington on Saturday night as the United . . .

all the nice gulls love a sailor. Ugh

Gill Partington

11 November 2020

Cain’s Jawbone, one of the more demanding puzzles of the 20th century, was recently solved for the third time. Devised by the inventor . . .

Meet the new boss

Tom Stevenson

10 November 2020

Trump was often derided as an isolationist by the imperial bureaucracy, for whom the term is a stock insult. His opponents liked to say he was . . .

Hurricane Eta hits the Mosquito Coast

John Perry

9 November 2020

Central America’s ‘Mosquito Coast’, the home of the Miskito people, stretches between Honduras and Nicaragua. The border is . . .

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In the next issue: David Runciman on Barack Obama, James Butler on Jeremy Corbyn, Rosemary Hill on the confessions of Barbara Amiel and Sasha Swire.

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