Poem of the week: Solitude by Peter McDonald
A wounded bird becomes an image for much wider damage to our world
Solitude
Paraphrase on Saint-John Perse, Anabase IV
Category Culture
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Vilhelm’s Room by Tove Ditlevsen review – a portrait of catastrophic mental illness
Originally published a year before her death, the Danish author’s final novel is an autofictional suicide note
Tove Ditlevsen’s last novel, Vilhelm’s Room, was originally published in Denmark in 1975. As it begins, the protagonist, Lise Mundus, has just been abandoned by Vilhelm, her husband of 20 years. He’s a celebrity newspaper editor; she’s an acclaimed writer with a history of addiction. From a bed in a psychiatric ward, Lise publishes a lonely hearts ad: “Recently escaped a long, unhappy marriage – aged 51, but youthful in spirit – wonderful son, aged 15 – household literary name – summerhouse – large flat in the city centre – temporarily incapacitated by a nervous breakdown – prefers a motorist.”
The ad is seized upon by Lise’s malicious upstairs neighbour, Mrs Thomsen, who shows it to her young lodger/lover, Kurt, hoping he can financially exploit Lise. Kurt is duly installed in Lise’s home, but finds himself treated there with total indifference. Lise is wholly consumed with memories of Vilhelm and with plans to end her own life. We know she will carry these out; in the opening pages, she is already dead.
Mother Mary Comes To Me by Arundhati Roy review – brave and absorbing
In this remarkable memoir, the Booker-winning novelist looks back on her bittersweet relationship with her mercurial mother
Twelve minutes into an interview with Allen Ginsberg for the BBC’s Face to Face, Jeremy Isaacs asks him about the extraordinary long poem he wrote about his mother: “In Kaddish, you mourn your mother. What was the effect on you of living with a mother who was mad?” Ginsberg’s answer, mildly inflected by a laugh, is: “It gave me a great sort of … tolerance for eccentric behaviour.”
Arundhati Roy, whose memoir is partly an account of her life with her mother Mary Roy, might recognise this insight. Arguably, all mothers appear to their children as mad: madness here meaning an unbounded force, at odds with what society imagines normal parenting to consist of. The manifestations of this madness are as disparate as those of love, and these two aspects – the abnormal, the overbearing, and the protective, the nurturing – can be, in our mothers, intimately intertwined (“She was my shelter and my storm,” writes Roy). It is through loving and depending on the mysterious and incomprehensible that we come to “tolerate”, even embrace, the strangest thing of all: life itself.
The Big Idea: why we should embrace AI doctors
People are understandably wary of new technology, but human error is often more lethal
We expect our doctors to be demi-gods – flawless, tireless, always right. But they are only human. Increasingly, they are stretched thin, working long hours, under immense pressure, and often with limited resources. Of course, better conditions would help, including more staff and improved systems. But even in the best-funded clinics with the most committed professionals, standards can still fall short; doctors, like the rest of us, are working with stone age minds. Despite years of training, human brains are not optimally equipped for the pace, pressure, and complexity of modern healthcare.
Given that patient care is medicine’s core purpose, the question is who, or what, is best placed to deliver it? AI may still spark suspicion, but research increasingly shows how it could help fix some of the most persistent problems and overlooked failures – from misdiagnosis and error to unequal access to care.
‘They had everything, then nothing’: the prodigies the art world forgot
Robert Colquhoun and Bobby MacBryde were once the golden boys of London’s art scene – photographed in Vogue, filmed by Ken Russell and lauded by Francis Bacon. So why did they vanish into obscurity?
The world is burning. Fascism is rising. Countries are falling. And we’re on the brink of incredible technological change, which will either be the end of everything or a new beginning. So, who needs artists?
An August night in 1944. Robert Colquhoun’s hand shakes as he lights a candle in the blacked-out Notting Hill studio shared with his lover, fellow artist, Robert “Bobby” MacBryde. They are known – from Soho alleys to Bond Street galleries – as the Two Roberts: inseparable, incandescent, often in trouble. Where is Bobby tonight? The Colony Room Club, probably. Safe, Robert hopes. Though never from himself. Bombers prowl the skies above. Who will survive the night? “Fuck it,” Robert mutters, fag dancing on his lip. And he picks up his brush.
‘Literature can be a form of resistance’: Lea Ypi talks to Elif Shafak about writing in the age of demagogues
The Albanian author of Free and Turkish novelist discuss the rise of populism, censorship – and how today’s conflicts all come from the unresolved trauma of the past
Lea Ypi’s prize-winning memoir, Free, detailed the experience of growing up in Albania both before and after communist rule. Her new book, Indignity, reconstructs the life of her grandmother, who arrived in Tirana from Salonica as a young woman and became closely involved with the country’s political life. She currently holds the Ralph Miliband chair in politics and philosophy at the London School of Economics. The Turkish writer Elif Shafak is author of more than 20 books, both nonfiction and fiction, including the Booker-shortlisted novel 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World and, most recently, There Are Rivers in the Sky. When the pair talked over videocall, Ypi travelling in India and Shafak at home in London, their conversation ranged over the threats of censorship and the rise of populism, the challenges of being writers with multiple identities and the importance of representing complex historical events in their work.
Elif Shafak It’s the age of angst. There’s so much anxiety, east and west, young and old, so many people are anxious right now, it’s quite palpable. And I think in many ways, it’s the golden era for demagoguery, for the populist demagogue to enter the stage and say: “Just leave it with me. I’m going to make things simple for you.”
What we’re reading: writers and readers on the books they enjoyed in August
Writers and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month. Join the conversation in the comments
One of my favourite reads recently has been Childish Literature by Chilean author Alejandro Zambra, translated by Megan McDowell. It’s a mixed-genre book of memoir, short fiction and poetry on the theme of parenting and new fatherhood, with lots of lucidity, humour and humility throughout.
Rebecca F Kuang: ‘A Tale of Two Cities is deeply silly camp – I love it!’
The US writer on being switched on to romance by Sally Rooney, the magic of David Mitchell and the joy of Jean-Paul Sartre
My favourite book growing up
Brian Jacques’s Redwall (and all its sequels). All I wanted was to be a squirrel in the Mossflower Woods!
The books that changed me as a teenager
I read China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station and The City & the City when I was in college. I had been falling out of love with fantasy – I felt too old for Redwall, and I thought I’d outgrown the genre – but Miéville’s work opened the door to the enormous world of adult fantasy literature that grappled with the problems I was now interested in.
Transcendence for Beginners by Clare Carlisle review – a philosopher’s guide to enlightenment
Can we experience something bigger than ourselves in the midst of busy, humdrum lives?
Some philosophers find inspiration in mountains, such as Nietzsche, and some in caves, like Plato. Clare Carlisle found hers in a cave halfway up a mountain.
It happened 20 years ago: walking on a Himalayan path, she met a holy man who lived in a cave nearby. Not your stereotypical sadhu, he didn’t have matted hair and wasn’t semi-naked but wore nice trousers and an acrylic pullover. Nor did he have any obvious wisdom to impart; at the last of their three meetings, he and Carlisle mainly got stoned and giggled about the chicken-like patterns on a cushion she had brought him as a gift. Yet, after leaving, she felt a “yearning” for something that they had shared: a sense that there could be a more “noble” way of living, or that we could experience “transcendence”, a higher perspective on life.
Gunk by Saba Sams audiobook review – messy nights and motherhood
The first novel from the Send Nudes author moves from a Brighton club to baby feeding
Gunk opens with new divorcee Jules sitting at home cradling a baby who is 24 hours and 17 minutes old, feeding him colostrum from a syringe. After being fed, the baby cries, which Jules interprets as a howl of rejection: “He has no language to tell me I’m not right for him.” We learn that Jules isn’t the child’s biological parent; the birth mother is Nim who, shortly after being stitched up, left the hospital ward and seemingly vanished. Concerned for her wellbeing, the hospital called the police who questioned Jules. “Nim has run away before,” she told them. “And she’s good at hiding.”
Set in Brighton, this is Saba Sams’s first novel, the follow-up to her much-admired short story collection Send Nudes. Where that book examined the lives of girls coming of age, Gunk has an older heroine in Jules, who is desperate to have a child. Her alcoholic ex-husband, Leon, who ran a student nightclub and with whom she tried and failed to conceive, cheated on her multiple times with his young staff. When one of the bartenders he slept with, Nim, discovered she was pregnant, she and Jules came to an arrangement and moved in together.