Monthly Archives: September 2007

Men in Space

September 11, 2007 – 8:13 pm

This interview with the novelist Tom McCarthy appears in the current issue of Time Out London.
Tom McCarthy’s first novel ‘Remainder’ was an unlikely bestseller. The chilly, highly formalised anatomy of an obsession (that of an unnamed narrator who has suffered an unspecified trauma), ‘Remainder’ was passed over by several mainstream publishers before being rescued from [...]

By Jonathan Derbyshire | Posted in Profiles | Tagged | Comments Off

Primo Levi’s Gaze

September 3, 2007 – 5:59 pm

In The Truce, Primo Levi describes a cruelly protracted train journey, following the liberation of Auschwitz, from Krakow to a transit camp at Katowice in Upper Silesia. When the train makes one of many unexplained stops, at a place called Trzebinia, Levi gets off to stretch his legs. Soon he is surrounded by a group [...]

By Jonathan Derbyshire | Posted in Essays, Reviews | Tagged , | Comments Off

The Death of Sigmund Freud

September 1, 2007 – 10:50 am

In 1914, Sigmund Freud published a short essay about Michelangelo’s statue of Moses. Freud had seen the sculpture, which shows the prophet holding tightly on to the tablets of the law, in the church of St Peter in Chains in Rome, and had been mesmerised by it. What was most arresting, he wrote, was that [...]

By Jonathan Derbyshire | Posted in Reviews | Tagged , , , | Comments Off