Kieran Setiya
Meetings with Disaster
I don’t know if misery loves company but I’m convinced that failure does. Losers like us are prone to revel in the losses of our enemies and to draw comfort from the failures of family and friends. If they have survived, so can we. When his projects fall flat, my son likes nothing better than to hear about the wreckage of mine: romantic fiascos, flunked tests, athletic defeats.
Joe Moran’s new book could have been written for him. ‘To those who have failed,’ he writes, ‘I offer no advice, only solace.’ The solace mainly takes the form of stories. Appointed in 1897 to a chair at Heidelberg, the sociologist Max Weber suffered a nervous breakdown and eventually resigned. (He went on to write The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, about the moral elevation of hard work.) Moran’s poster child for impostor syndrome, the Italian author Natalia Ginzburg, considered herself a failure throughout her life. (Among other brilliant works, she is known for an essay called ‘Laziness’.) In a final case study, Moran describes a failed artist who ‘neither learnt from his failures nor wished to learn’; he finished few paintings and is most famous for a fresco whose colours began to flake before he died. (This was Leonardo da Vinci.)
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
Chuffed to be on the Curiosity Pill 2020 round-up for my @Lit_Review piece on swimming, which I cannot wait to get back to after 10+ months away https://literaryreview.co.uk/different-strokes https://twitter.com/RNGCrit/status/1351922254687383553
'The authors do not shrink from spelling out the scale of the killings when the Rhodesians made long-distance raids on guerrilla camps in Mozambique and Zambia.'
Xan Smiley on how Rhodesia became Zimbabwe.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/what-the-secret-agent-saw
'Thirkell was a product of her time and her class. For her there are no sacred cows, barring those that win ribbons at the Barchester Agricultural.'
The novelist Angela Thirkell is due a revival, says Patricia T O'Conner (£).
https://literaryreview.co.uk/good-gad