In the Critics section of this week’s New Statesman, poet Julia Copus writes about the link between physical illness and the creative life. Copus was diagnosed with endometriosis at the age of 26. “Hilary Mantel, a fellow endometriosis sufferer, believes the disease was at least partly responsible for her choice to become a writer,” she notes. “In some ancient cultures there is a deity for illness, which strikes me as refreshingly clear. If such a god existed for us today, I would be glad of the chance to offer up a prayer of thanks for the rich crop of art he has nurtured into being.”
In Books, the NS’s lead reviewer John Gray writes about The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies by American polymath Jared Diamond. “If we’d retained some of the constructive paranoia of traditional cultures,” Gray writes, “we might still not have able to prevent the neoliberal experiment; but we would have been better prepared for the fiasco that has ensued.”
Also in Books: Simon Heffer reviews Sorry!, Henry Hitchings’s books about the English and their manners (“Hitchings comes to the unhelpful conclusion that although everybody seems to think manners are getting worse, actually they are not. How does he know?”); Alexandra Coghlan on Alan Rusbridger’s memoir Play It Again (“Rusbridger follows the well-trodden path back to the instrument of his youth”); Heather Brooke reviews two books about Britain’s secret state, Cruel Britannia by Ian Cobain and Classified by Christopher Moran (“Cruel Britannia makes for deeply depressing reading. But to ignore its findings would be to grant impunity to actions that reveal the worst of human behaviour”); Sarah Churchwell on Alone in America, a study of the representation of loneliness in American literature by Robert A Ferguson (“Are Americans really more susceptible to estrangement than others?”); novelist Linda Grant reviews Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death, by the Holocaust survivor and historian Otto Dov Kulka (“Nothing else I have read comes close to this profound examination of what the Holocaust means”).
In the Books interview, Jonathan Derbyshire talks to Canadian writer Sheila Heti about her novel How Should a Person Be? “I think of it as a novel – but only because I can’t think of a better word … I love fiction … but when I was writing this I was asking myself: ‘Why am I doing this?’”
Elsewhere in the Critics: Ryan Gilbey is impressed by Zero Dark Thirty’s ambivalence about torture; Rachel Cooke is underwhelmed by a new BBC comedy, Bob Servant Independent; Antonia Quirke sings the praises of a Radio 4 Extra adaptation of Philip K Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; Matt Trueman visits the London International Mime Festival; and Kate Mossman reviews new albums by veterans Nick Cave and Johnny Marr.
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