Lesley Chamberlain
Is What I See A Flower?
Botany: A Study of Pure Curiosity
By Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Kate Ottevanger (trans.)
Michael Joseph 156pp £10 order from our bookshop
Here is a slim, beautifully-produced volume aimed, I think, at the well-educated browser. Its essence lies in the charm of disinterest. Rousseau’s definition of botany as a study of pure curiosity has been incorporated into the present title from the seventh of eight letters originally published at Lettres Elémentaires sur la Botanique. In his introduction Roy McMullen doubts that Rousseau wanted to discount the scientific value of a subject that at times claimed all his intellectual resources. But he rightly alerts the reader to the tone of ‘gentlemanly amateurism’ that colours this minor work of the last years. That is its modern appeal.
The letters are not fictions. Rousseau addressed them to a young woman of his acquaintance for the eventual instruction of her daughter. On her behalf he had high hopes of a science that ‘abates the taste for frivolous amusements, subdues the tumults of passion and bestows upon the mind a
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'As it starts to infect your dreams, you realise that "Portal 2" is really an allegory of the imaginative leap: the way in which we traverse the space between distant concepts, via the secret conduits we place within them.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/portal-agony
'Any story about Eden has to be a story about the Fall; unchanging serenity does not make a narrative.'
@suzifeay reviews Jim Crace's 'eden'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/trouble-in-paradise
The first holiday camps had an 'ethos of muscular health as a marker of social respectability, and were alcohol-free. How different from our modern Costa Brava – not to mention the innumerable other coasts around the world now changed forever'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/from-mont-blanc-to-magaluf