Darling, are you mad?

Jenny Diski

  • Ghosting by Jennie Erdal
    Canongate, 270 pp, £14.99, November 2004, ISBN 1 84195 562 0

We could, as a homage to Derrida, go deep with this story of an immigrant, a wealthy man, a publisher and ‘cultural tycoon’ (Quartet Books, Women’s Press, the Literary Review, the Wire, the Oldie, chief executive of Asprey’s and, in 1993, voted Retail Personality of the Year), who employed an educated but intellectually insecure Scots woman, a translator with an academic husband and three children, to ghost novels, interviews, newspaper and magazine columns, love letters and ‘the occasional poem’ which he passed off as his own – but we won’t. Shallow, I think, is the proper level. Not that this text isn’t interesting, or even important. On the contrary, it’s interestingly shallow, even importantly shallow. It tells us of shallow things, and we need to pay attention to the entirely superficial, for how else are we going to understand the ways of the contemporary world?

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[*] LRB, 12 November 1987.

[†] A postscript. A very slim volume, The Old Ladies of Nazareth, has just arrived from Quartet. It claims to be by Naim Attallah, who in a signed preface says he wrote it in three days in August 2004. It is, he tells us, a tale of two wonderful old ladies who lived in the Holy Land. It’s very short. If you want to read it, go ahead.

Vol. 26 No. 21 · 4 November 2004 » Jenny Diski » Darling, are you mad? (print version)
Pages 33-34 | 3518 words