Never trust anyone who tries to be ethically pure. This is the message of Albert Camus’s short novel La Chute (The Fall), in which a retired French lawyer tells a stranger in a bar in Amsterdam about a series of incidents that led to a profound personal crisis. The self-described ‘judge-penitent’ had once thought himself to be morally irreproachable, but an encounter with a woman on a bridge and a mysterious laugh left him tormented by a sense of hypocrisy. In this episode, Jonathan and James follow Camus’s slippery hero as he tries and fails to undergo a moral revolution, and look at the ways in which the novel’s lightness of style allows for twisted inversions of conventional morality. They also consider the similarities between Camus’s novels and those of Simone de Beauvoir, and his fractious relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrcip⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingscip⁠⁠

Further reading in the LRB:

Jeremy Harding: Algeria's Camus: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/cip11camus1⁠⁠

Jacqueline Rose: 'The Plague': ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/cip11camus3⁠⁠

Adam Shatz: Camus in the New World: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/cip11camus2⁠⁠

Audiobooks from the LRB

Including Jonathan Rée's 'Becoming a Philosopher: Spinoza to Sartre': ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookscip⁠

In The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James borrows from Eliot, Austen, folktales and potboilers, but ‘the thing that he took from nowhere was Isabel Archer’. James transformed the 19th-century novel through his evocation of Isabel, a woman who wants and suffers in a profoundly new (and American) way.

Deborah Friedell and Colm Toíbín join Tom to discuss the novel that established Henry James as ‘the Master’. They dissect James’s and his characters’ complicated motivations, the significance of his 1905-6 revisions, and the ways in which a ‘primitive plot’ irrupts in a painstakingly subtle and stylish novel.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna⁠⁠

Further reading in the LRB:

Colm Toíbín on Henry James:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v30/n01/colm-toibin/a-man-with-my-trouble⁠

Ruth Bernard Yeazell on Henry James’s life and notebooks:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v10/n01/ruth-bernard-yeazell/the-henry-james-show⁠

James Wood on The Portrait of a Lady:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n19/james-wood/perfuming-the-money-issue⁠

Next time on Novel Approaches: 'Kidnapped!' by Robert Louis Stevenson.

LRB Audiobooks

Discover audiobooks from the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksna

Jay Bernard’s 'Surge' and Kei Miller’s 'In Nearby Bushes', both published in 2019, address acts of violence whose victims were not directly known to the writers: in Surge, the deaths of thirteen Black teenagers in the New Cross Fire of 1981; in Miller’s poem, a series of rapes and murders in Jamaica. Both can be seen as collective elegies, interleaving newspaper and medical reports, and other archival documents, with more lyrical passages, and both can be read as comments on the state of the nation as well as personal expressions of desolation. While Bernard’s poem opens out into an investigation of radical Black history and the marginalisation of Black communities in London, Miller uses blanked-out newspaper items, among other techniques, to search for the ‘understory’, an experience beyond language, which is in turn connected to colonial, and pre-colonial, Jamaica. In this episode, Mark and Seamus consider the different ways these poets respond to the shocking events they depict, while also incorporating them into a broader poetic landscape.

Watch Jay Bernard reading from 'Surge' at the London Review Bookshop: https://youtu.be/XTZKYEimq2Y

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrld⁠⁠⁠⁠

In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsld

Leonora Carrington was a prodigious artist closely associated with major surrealists of the 1930s. Though only sporadically in print until recently, her writing has helped cement her cult status, not least The Hearing Trumpet (1974).

Before her family consign her to an old-age facility, nonagenarian Marian Leatherby is gifted a hearing trumpet with almost magical capabilities. Her institutionalisation leads to much eavesdropping, a Grail quest, descent into the underworld and an apocalyptic ice age.

Joyous, disturbing and subversive, The Hearing Trumpet is full of themes and images that populate Carrington’s artwork and other writing. Both Marina and Chloe knew Leonora Carrington, and in this episode they reflect on the ways her personality inflected her work. Their reading of The Hearing Trumpet reveals her humour, her visionary imagination and her attention to the boundaries between inner and outer realities.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrff⁠⁠⁠⁠

In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsff⁠⁠⁠

Further reading in the LRB:

Chloe Aridjis: A Leonora Carrington A to Z

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2017/april/a-leonora-carrington-a-to-z

Alice Spawls: On Leonora Carrington

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v37/n08/alice-spawls/at-tate-liverpool

Edmund Gordon: Save the feet for later

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n21/edmund-gordon/save-the-feet-for-later

Next episode: Marina and Chloe discuss J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition and Angela Carter’s The Passion of the New Eve.

At the heart of human existence is a tragic ambiguity: the fact that we experience ourselves both as subject and object, internal and external, at the same time, and can never fully inhabit either state. In her 1947 book, Simone de Beauvoir addresses the ethical implications of this uncertainty and the ‘agonising evidence of freedom’ it presents, along with the opportunity it creates for continual self-definition. In this episode Jonathan and James discuss these arguments and Beauvoir’s warnings against trying to evade the responsibilities imposed upon us by this ambiguity. They also look at the ways in which Beauvoir developed these ideas in The Second Sex and her novels, and her remarkable readings of George Eliot, Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrcip⁠⁠⁠

In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingscip

Read more in the LRB:

Joanna Biggs: ⁠https://lrb.me/cipbeauvoir1⁠

Toril Moi: ⁠https://lrb.me/cipbeauvoir2⁠

Elaine Showalter: ⁠https://lrb.me/cipbeauvoir3⁠

Audiobooks from the LRB

Including Jonathan Rée's 'Becoming a Philosopher: Spinoza to Sartre': ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookscip

Trollope enthusiasts Tom Crewe and Dinah Birch say they could have chosen any one of his 47 novels for this episode, so it’s no wonder Elizabeth Bowen called him ‘the most sheerly able of the Victorian novelists’. They settled on The Last Chronicle of Barset: a model example of Anthony Trollope’s gift for comedy, pathos, social commentary and masterful dialogue.

At the heart of Last Chronicle is a mystery: how did the impoverished Reverend Crawley get his hands on a cheque for £20 that no one can account for, and is he capable of theft? The scandal has dire repercussions not only for Reverend Crawley, but the whole county: his ostracision raises broader questions about inequity in the church; it sparks rifts between his daughter, her would-be husband and his parents; and it gives his young relative Johnny Eames an excuse to flee the entanglements of London high society for the continent, in search of the only man who may be able to solve the puzzle. Although it’s the final book in the Barchester series, Last Chronicle can be read as a standalone novel, and Tom and Dinah join Thomas Jones to explore its sensitivities, ambivalences and sheer readability.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠⁠⁠⁠

In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna⁠⁠

Further reading in the LRB:

John Sutherland: Trollopiad

⁠⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v14/n01/john-sutherland/trollopiad⁠⁠

Richard Altick: Trollope’s Delight

⁠⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v06/n08/richard-altick/trollope-s-delight⁠⁠

Next time on Novel Approaches: 'The Portrait of a Lady' by Henry James.

LRB Audiobooks

Discover audiobooks from the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksna

Without Emma Gifford, we might never have heard of Thomas Hardy. Hardy’s first wife was instrumental in his decision to abandon architecture for a writing career, and a direct influence – possibly collaborator – on his early novels. Their marriage, initially passionate, defied family expectations and class barriers, but by the time of Emma’s death, it had deteriorated into hostility and bitterness. Out of grief, regret and ambivalence, Hardy produced the work Mark Ford considers to be among ‘the greatest poems in any language’: Poems of 1912-13.

Mark and Seamus discuss the collection in the light of what Hardy called ‘strange necromancy’: the reconfiguring of Emma as ghost, critic, corpse and mythic lover. They pay close attention to the tight structure and novelistic detail in these poems, which exemplify Hardy’s gift for mixing the lyrical with realism.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrld⁠⁠⁠

In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsld

Read the poems:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2863/2863-h/2863-h.htm

Further reading and listening from the LRB:

On Mark’s book, Woman Much Missed:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n19/matthew-bevis/i-prefer-my-mare⁠

Hugh Haughton on Hardy’s ghosts and Emma’s diary:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v07/n21/hugh-haughton/ghosts⁠

Dinah Birch on the letters of the two Mrs Hardies:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v18/n22/dinah-birch/defence-of-the-housefly⁠

Mark and Seamus on Hardy for Modern-ish Poets:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/close-readings/modern-ish-poets-thomas-hardy⁠

Mark and Mary Wellesley discuss A Pair of Blue Eyes:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/the-lrb-podcast/thomas-hardy-s-medieval-mind⁠

Jorge Luis Borges was a librarian with rock star status, a stimulus for magical realism who was not a magical realist, and a wholly original writer who catalogued and defined his own precursors. It’s fitting that he was fascinated by paradoxes, and his most famous stories are fantasias on themes at the heart of this series: dreams, mirrors, recursion, labyrinths, language and creation.

Marina and Chloe explore Borges’s fiction with particular focus on two stories: ‘The Circular Ruins’ and ‘The Aleph’. They discuss the many contradictions and puzzles in his life and work, and the ways in which he transformed the writing of his contemporaries, successors and distant ancestors.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrff⁠⁠⁠

In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsff⁠⁠

Further reading in the LRB:

Michael Wood on Borges’s collected fiction:

⁠⁠⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v21/n03/michael-wood/productive-mischief⁠⁠⁠

Colm Toíbìn on Borges’s life:

⁠⁠⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v28/n09/colm-toibin/don-t-abandon-me⁠⁠⁠

Marina Warner on enigmas and riddles:

⁠⁠⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n03/marina-warner/doubly-damned⁠⁠⁠

Daniel Wassbeim on Sur and Borges’s circle:

⁠⁠⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v10/n05/daniel-waissbein/dying-for-madame-ocampo⁠⁠⁠

Next episode: Marina and Chloe discuss The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington.

What is an emotion? In his Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (1939), Sartre picks up what William James, Martin Heidegger and others had written about this question to suggest what he believed to be a new thought on human emotion and its relation to consciousness. For Sartre, the emotions are not external forces acting upon consciousness but an action of consciousness as it tries to rearrange the world to suit itself, or as he puts it at the end of his book: a sudden fall of consciousness into magic. In this episode Jonathan and James discuss why Sartre’s rejection of the idea of the subconscious is not as much a departure from Freud’s theories as he thought they were, and the ways in which his attempt to establish a ‘phenomenological psychology’ manifested in other works, including Nausea, Being and Nothingness and The Words.

Note: Readers should use the translation by Philip Mairet. The earlier one by Bernard Frechtman, as Jonathan explains in the episode, contains numerous (often amusing) errors.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrcip⁠⁠

In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingscip

Further reading in the LRB:

Jonathan Rée on 'Being and Nothingness': ⁠https://lrb.me/cipsartre1⁠

Sissela Bok on Sartre's life: ⁠https://lrb.me/cipsartre2⁠

Edwards Said's encounter with Sartre: ⁠https://lrb.me/cipsartre3⁠

Audiobooks from the LRB

Including Jonathan Rée's 'Becoming a Philosopher: Spinoza to Sartre':

⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookscip

'Our Mutual Friend' was Dickens’s last completed novel, published in serial form in 1864-65. The story begins with a body being dredged from the ooze and slime of the Thames, then opens out to follow a wide array of characters through the dust heaps, paper mills, public houses and dining rooms of London and its hinterland. For this episode, Tom is joined by Rosemary Hill and Tom Crewe to make sense of a complex work that was not only the last great social novel of the period but also gestured forwards to the crisp, late-century cynicism of Oscar Wilde. They consider the ways in which the book was responding to the darkening mood of mid-Victorian Britain and the fading of the post-Waterloo generation, as well as the remarkable flexibility of its prose, with its shifting modes, tenses and perspectives, that combine to make 'Our Mutual Friend' one of the most rewarding of Dickens’s novels.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠

In other podcast apps: ⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna

Next time on Novel Approaches: 'The Last Chronicle of Barset' by Anthony Trollope

Further reading in the LRB:

John Sutherland on Peter Ackroyd's Dickens: https://lrb.me/nadickens1

David Trotter on Dickens's tricks: https://lrb.me/nadickens2

Brigid Brophy on Edwin Drood: https://lrb.me/nadickens3

LRB Audiobooks

Discover audiobooks from the LRB: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksna