Loneliness

Tasty meals and epiphanies: that’s what Banana Yoshimoto mostly deals in. It’s no accident that her most famous book is entitled Kitchen. Sometimes the epiphanies come by way of the tasty meals; at other times they are triggered by effects of light playing over rivers, trees, landscapes, as if we had suddenly found ourselves inside a print by Hiroshige. And loneliness. She’s the supreme poet of solitude, and how it can grip even in the middle of one of the world’s busiest cities; even alongside a loving partner. And sudden death. But that’s making Yoshimoto’s graceful work sound far too depressing. There are always the epiphanies, and cake, and chicken with rice, but most of all the tiny kindnesses from other human beings that make life worth persevering with.

Claire Gilbert considers Julian of Norwich to be the mother of English literature, and believes she should stand alongside Chaucer. What seems indisputable is that Julian was the author of the first work written in English by a woman. This rather wonderful fictional autobiography was published to coincide with the 650th anniversary of Julian first experiencing, in May 1373, the series of 16 visions she wrote about in Revelations of Divine Love. It comes garlanded with praise from, among others, Jeremy Irons and Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury.

‘Dearest Gwen,’ writes Celia Paul, born 1959, to Gwen John, died 1939, ‘I know this letter to you is an artifice. I know you are dead and that I’m alive... But I do feel mysteriously connected to you.’ And well she might, because the parallels between the lives of the two painters are legion. To take the most obvious: both were students at the Slade, both had relationships with much older artists and both came to be seen, for a time at least, through the prism of their association with men. Gwen John was the older sister of the once more famous Augustus and model and lover of the French sculptor Auguste Rodin; Celia Paul, the lover, model and mother of a son of the painter Lucian Freud.

‘The drawer beside Roberta’s bed contained remnants of other people’s fun’: so begins ‘Mathematics’, one of 11 stories in this outstanding collection by the Belfast author Wendy Erskine. The opening is Erskine in miniature: the wry, unostentatious prose; the sad interiors with their charged objects (‘a small mother-of-pearl box inlaid with gold, a lipstick that was a stripe of fuchsia, a lucky charm in the shape of a dollar sign’); a character’s casual curiosity about the intimate affairs of others. A bereaved mother scours Belfast with a paint scraper, removing the ‘missing’ posters of her dead son Dance Move might also have been titled Other People’s Fun.

The subjugation of nature has formed a cornerstone of the human agenda. How surprising and humbling, then, to find our way of life so rapidly and unexpectedly undermined by a biological force that transcends identity and culture. Still worse, when we discover that the source of this chaos is a sub-microscopic viral particle whose genetic code — simpler than a bacterium — is barely compatible with a living entity. Yet it has brought global civilisation to a standstill.

‘You’re never alone with a Strand,’ went the misbegotten advertisement for a new cigarette in 1959. What the copywriter didn’t realise is that smokers often smoke to be alone. As Mass Observation had reported a decade earlier: In an increasingly gregarious world, where fewer and fewer habits and pastimes are entirely individual, the cigarette remains for most people a pleasure that, whatever its social significance, can be enjoyed in entire solitude, and a pleasure that remains entirely individual. At the time, 80 per cent of British men and 40 per cent of women were regular smokers. Smoking was not just a means of inhaling death and of escaping the dead hand of others’ sociability, but briefly put the unbearableness of life behind a smoky veil.