Sam Leith
What The Doctor Did
'WOMEN', WROTE GERMAINEG Greer in The Female Eunuch, 'have very little idea of how much men hate them - men do not themselves know the depth of their hatred.' Margaret Mazzantini, the Italian author of this captivating, utterly horrific novel, appears to be an exception. I cannot remember having read a story delivered in the first person since Lolita whose narrator is at once so monstrous and so opaque to himself.
Timoteo is the highly respected senior surgeon at a large hospital. He is on duty when, into the emergency department, there comes a patient he recognises. His fifteen-year-old daughter, Angela, has been knocked off her scooter, and has sustained life-threatening injuries. He waits as a colleague operates to try to
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Joanna Kavenna reviews Maggie Nelson's ‘On Freedom’, ‘a very serious and beautiful book about why “freedom” has become such a vexed term, deployed so often in scenarios where it really means the opposite’.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/in-defence-of-ambivalence