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G lobal politics is disconcertingly interesting at the moment. One lesson from the EU Referendum in Great Britain has been that an insurgency movement, a political uprising motivated – to whatever extent – by frustration and anti-establishment fervour, has finally succeeded at the ballot box. The Brexit vote has proved that our political verities have become somewhat shaky of late.
So, we may be living in a post-fact, postexpertise world. The world, in other words, of Donald Trump, the reluctant subject of Richard Ford’s essay this week. Ford sees Trump as many see him, “preening and grimacing and mugging Mussolini-like, wagging his undersized finger”, but also notes that his rise to popularity should make America look more closely at itself. Trump, to Ford, is a “gaudy, tarnished symptom of our American disease”; an emblem of its unwillingness as a nation to confront its own reality: “it’s really we who’re threatened with not quite fully existing”, concludes Ford, “it’s we who’re guilty of not having something better on our minds”.
If Trump is a figure of – to put it generously – evanescent talent, he contrasts clearly with the polymathic Goethe, active over a life of eightytwo years “as a poet, novelist, dramatist, essayist, librettist, translator, biographer, diarist, conversationalist, critic, theatre director, collector, painter, sculptor” and so on. The “essential” Goethe, one of the titles reviewed by Osman Durrani, is thus relatively difficult to boil down. His career and life encompassed arts and sciences, iconoclasm and establishment success, peaceful civilian duties and the French Revolution. He even took the time, we learn, to write a narrative poem on the causes of erectile dysfunction. He was an author, as Durrani notes, of continual metamorphosis.
However changeable a life might be, its narrative path only reaches one end. When Jenny Diski was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, she resented the “pre-ordained banality” of the rest of her story, as she was left glumly to navigate “an already drawn flow-chart”.
Instead, she has bequeathed to the world something greater than a flow chart: a memoir of a life well lived and beautifully described, of torments and troubles overcome at considerable cost. Diski lived as a teenager with Doris Lessing, having been raped at fourteen and later left homeless by heedless parents. Terri Apter discerns a “high octane rage that leaves her with a fiercely introverted spirit, proudly subjective, easily damaged and despoiled by the platitudes of commonplace exchanges”.
Diski’s memoir is a hymn to that rage, but also the means by which she overcame it. It is a story of how she learned gratitude, and a piece of work for which we can be grateful too.
SA
GERMAN LITERATURE 3O sman Durrani
Ritchie Robertson Goethe – A very short introduction. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe The Essential Goethe; Edited by Matthew Bell
MEMOIRS
5Terri Apter
Jenny Diski In Gratitude
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 6
The Referendum and democracy, Beckett’s vim, Pity the blobfish, etc
POLITICS
7Richard Ford
Anatomy of Trump – A personal essay
NATURAL HISTORY
HISTORY
9Jeremy Mynott
10 Roy Foster
John James Audubon The Missouri River Journals; Edited by Daniel Patterson
Richard Bourke and Ian McBride, editors The Princeton History of Modern Ireland
POEM
11 Stephen Knight
As I Live and Breathe
BIOGRAPHY
12 Kaya Genç
Gerri Kimber
Emer O’Sullivan The Fall of the House of Wilde – Oscar Wilde and his family Stanley Price James Joyce and Italo Svevo – The story of a friendship
POETRY
14 Justin Quinn
Tom Walker Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time. Michael Allen Close Readings – Essays on Irish poetry; Edited by Fran Brearton. Harry Clifton Ireland and its Elsewheres – The Poet’s Chair: Writings from the Ireland Chair of Poetry. John Dennison Seamus Heaney and the Adequacy of Poetry
COMMENTARY
ARTS
16 Ian Thomson
Katherine Ashenburg Waiting for life – Natalia Ginzburg 100 years on Freelance
18 Craig Raine
Guy Dammann Patrick McCaughey
Georgia O’Keeffe (Tate Modern) Giuseppe Verdi Il Trovatore (Royal Opera House) Richard Serra (Gagosian Gallery, New York)
FICTION
ECOLOGY
21 Kate Webb
Norma Clarke Rebecca K. Morrison James Copnall Sam Byers
24 Richard Betts
Harry Johnstone
ANTHROPOLOGY
26 Jeremy Swift
Michael F. Brown
LITERARY CRITICISM 27 David Winters
Kirsty Martin
MEDICINE & SCIENCE 29 John Henry
Marina Gerner
IN BRIEF
30
POLITICS
32 Sholto Byrnes
Harry Mount
CULTURAL STUDIES
33 Houman Barekat
FROM THE ARCHIVES 34
NB
35
36 M. C.
John Keene Counternarratives Francis Spufford Golden Hill Roberto Schopflocher Das Komplott zu Lima Patrice Nganang Mount Pleasant; Translated by Amy Baram Reid Helen Oyeyemi What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours
Tim Flannery Atmosphere of Hope – Solutions to the climate crisis. Oliver Morton The Planet Remade – How geoengineering could change the world Joel K. Bourne The End of Plenty – The race to feed a crowded world David Rieff The Reproach of Hunger – Food, justice, and money in the twenty-first century
Nick McDonell The Civilization of Perpetual Movement Nicholas C. Kawa Amazonia in the Anthropocene – People, soils, plants, forests
Rita Felski The Limits of Critique Ross Posnock Renunciation – Acts of abandonment by writers, philosophers, and artists
Richard Barnett Crucial Interventions – An illustrated treatise on the principles and practice of nineteenth-century surgery Ronald L. Numbers and Kostas Kampourakis, editors Newton’s Apple and Other Myths About Science
Marc Singer Trump & Me. Evelyn Louise Crawford and Marylouise Patterson, editors Letters from Langston. Wilkie Collins Jezebel’s Daughter. R. J. Arnold Grétry’s Operas and the French Public. Alexei Sayle Thatcher Stole My Trousers. Susan Beale The Good Guy. Jillian Keenan Sex with Shakespeare. Kate Moore The Radium Girls
J. J. Robinson The Maldives – Islamic republic, tropical autocracy Ben Wright Order, Order! – The rise and fall of political drinking
Darian Leader Hands – What we do with them – and why
On Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis (from the TLS February 14, 1905)
This week’s contributors, Crossword
Geoffrey Hill’s jam-jar, Battles in Boston and Buenos Aires, Page 147
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TLS JULY 15 2016