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London Review of Books Christmas Books

The Inner Lives of Quiet Women subscriber-only content

Joanna Kavenna

  • May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian by Suzanne Raitt

With the decline of religious faith, we drift, so it’s said, on the current, clinging to the raft of materialism. The last flickers of collective spiritual belief were doused by the technological advances and grotesque warfare of the early years of the 20th century. Which led, the argument runs, to the mimesis-warping nihilism of Dada and the Vorticists, the semiotic anarchies of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. Think of Ulrich, the hero of The Man without Qualities, and his ‘dreadful feeling of blind space’, of nothingness at the heart of everything.

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Joanna Kavenna’s The Ice Museum: In Search of the Lost Land of Thule is published by Viking. She currently holds a writing fellowship at St John’s College, Cambridge.