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 realties.

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

Seamus and Mark look at four elegies written for family members, ranging from the romantic period to the 2010s, each of which avoids, deliberately or not, what Freud described as the work of mourning. William Wordsworth’s ‘Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a View of Peele Castle’ (1807) is an oblique memorial to a brother that seems scarcely able to mention its subject. Like Wordsworth, Denise Riley’s elegy for her son, ‘A Part Song’ (2012), embraces the atemporal nature of poetry as a protest against the destructive power of time, but also uses dramatic shifts in register to openly question the use of ‘song’ as a method of mourning. Robert Lowell’s elegies for his parents, from Life Studies (1959), offer a startling resistance to the traditional elegiac mode by spurning the urge to grandiloquence with a series of prosaic vignettes. Anne Carson’s ‘Nox’ (2010) goes further by challenging the idea of a coherent account of someone’s life entirely, with a sequence of fragments contained within a single sheet of paper, ranging from poems and translations to telephone conversations, photographs and drawings, as a deliberately disordered memory of her relationship with her brother that nonetheless exposes the purest ingredients of elegy.

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/applecrld⁠

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

Poems discussed in this episode:

William Wordsworth, ‘Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a View of Peele Castle’

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45516/elegiac-stanzas-suggested-by-a-picture-of-peele-castle-in-a-storm-painted-by-sir-george-beaumont

Robert Lowell, selections from ’Life Studies’

https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/stock/life-studies-robert-lowell

Denise Riley, ‘A Part Song’

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n03/denise-riley/a-part-song

Anne Carson, Nox

https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/stock/nox-anne-carson

Next episode: ‘Poems of 1912-1913’ by Thomas Hardy.

Born from grief, exile, intellectual ferment and the ‘year

In their fourth conversation together, Adam Thirlwell and Marina Warner explore Shelley’s treatment of birth, death, monstrosity and the limits of science. They discuss Frankenstein’s philosophical and personal undercurrents, and how the creature and his creator have broken free from the book.

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/applecrff⁠

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

Read more in the LRB:

Claire Tomalin on Mary Shelley’s letters:

⁠https://lrb.me/ffshelley1⁠

Caroline Gonda on the original Frankenstein:

⁠https://lrb.me/ffshelley2⁠

Marilyn Butler on Frankenstein as myth:

⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/ffshelley3⁠

Anne Barton on Mary Shelley’s life:

⁠https://lrb.me/ffshelley4⁠

LRB Audiobooks

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

What does it mean for a jug to be a jug? Or for any thing to be called a ‘thing’? In his 1950 lecture ‘Das Ding’, Heidegger attempts to cajole his audience away from their everyday way of seeing the world as consisting of objects that can be represented objectively, and into the kind of thinking that ‘responds and recalls’. For Heidegger, the world we experience is one of dynamic movement between revelation and concealment, where the essential nature of a thing lies in its ‘thinging’, and the ‘jug’s jug character consists in the poured gift of the jug’s pouring out’. In this episode Jonathan and James work through Heidegger’s ideas about both ‘things’ and time, and consider the purpose of his poetic style.

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:

Richard Rorty: Heidegger's Worlds

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v12/n03/richard-rorty/diary⁠

J.P. Stern: Heil Heidegger

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v11/n08/j.p.-stern/heil-heidegger⁠

James Miller: Arendt and Heidegger

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v17/n20/james-miller/thinking-without-a-banister

LRB AUDIOBOOKS

Discover audiobooks from the LRB, including Jonathan Rée's Becoming a Philosopher: Spinoza to Sartre:

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookscip⁠⁠