On Trying to Keep Still by Jenny Diski - review by Kathy Watson

Kathy Watson

Navel-Gazing

On Trying to Keep Still

By

Little Brown 320pp £15.99 order from our bookshop
 

‘To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.’ So runs Robert Louis Stevenson’s well-known dictum. He might have said something different if he’d had a travelling companion like Jenny Diski. ‘One of the things about being a believer’, she writes of an encounter with an evangelical Christian, ‘is that you don’t give up hope. One of the things about me is that I do.’

Diski doesn’t travel hopefully: in fact she’d much rather be at home, preferably under the bedclothes. ‘All the places I imagine myself in are solitary, silent and visually appealing,’ she says before going on to say that the description fits her workroom perfectly. She describes herself as ‘sloth-like’ and ‘resistant

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

The Art of Darkness

Cambridge, Shakespeare

Follow Literary Review on Twitter