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NON-FICTION: MEMOIR AND TRAVEL
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This is Jenny Diski at her essayistic
best in a highly personal and entertaining exploration
of the twentieth century’s most colourful decade.
Many books have been written on the Sixties: tributes to
music and fashion, sex, drugs and revolution. In The Sixties,
Jenny Diski breaks the mould, wryly dismantling the big
ideas that dominated the era – liberation, permissiveness
and self-invention – to consider what she and her
generation were really up to. Was it rude to refuse to
have sex with someone? Did they take drugs to get by, or
to see the world differently? How responsible were they
for the self-interest and greed of the Eighties? With characteristic
wit and verve, Diski takes an incisive look at the radical
beliefs to which her generation subscribed, little realising
they were often old ideas dressed up in new forms, sometimes
patterned by BIBA. She considers whether she and her peers
were as serious as they thought about changing the world,
if the radical sixties were funded by the baby-boomers'
parents, and if the big idea shaping the Sixties was that
it really felt as if it meant something to be young.
Click on any of the links below to view some online
reviews:
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Click
here for reviews>> |
On
Trying to Keep Still (Little, Brown April 2006)
Jenny Diski's two most recent works of nonfiction, SKATING TO ANTARCTICA and
STRANGER ON A TRAIN, described what were as much inner as outer journeys, journeys
of the mind. In these books, she confessed that she is never so happy as when
she is at home, and that her urge to travel is a contrary one, something she
is not sure that she herself understands. In ON TRYING TO KEEP STILL, she explores
her own contrariness in new and challenging ways. Inspired by Michel de Montaigne,
who retired to a tower in southern France in middle life and hardly ever left
it, writing timeless essays which have since become famous, Jenny sets out to
record her own state of mind in places as varied as New Zealand, deepest Somerset
and inside the Arctic Circle.
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On Trying to Keep Still was published in April,
2006 by LittleBrown. |
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Stranger
on a Train (Virago 2002)
In spite of the fact that her idea of travel is to stay home with the phone off
the hook, Jenny Diski takes a trip around the perimeter of the USA by train.
Somewhat reluctantly, she meets all kinds of characters, all bursting with stories
to tell, and finds herself brooding about the marvellously familiar landscape
of America, half-known already through film and television. Like the pulse of
the train over the rails, the theme of the dying pleasures of smoking thrums
through the book, along with reflections on the condition of solitude and the
nature of friendship and memories triggered by her past times in psychiatric
hospitals.
Cutting between her troubled teenaged years and contemporary America, the journey
becomes a study of strangers, strangeness and estrangement – from oneself,
as well as from the world.
‘ Rattles furiously along its tracks,
creating frequent sparks and taking unforseen turns.’ Financial
Times
‘ More like a memoir than a travelogue: a magical history tour.’ Sunday
Telegraph
‘Beautifully written.’ The Times
‘A formidable travel writer.’ Irish Times |
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Skating
to Antarctica (Virago 1997)
'This strange and brilliant book recounts
Jenny Diski's journey to Antarctica last year, intercut with another
journey into her own heart and soul… a book of dazzling variety,
which weaves disquisitions on indolence, truth, inconsistency, ambiguousness,
the elephant seal, Shackleton, boredom and over and over again memory,
into a sparse narrative, caustic observation and vivid description of
the natural world. While Diski's writing is laconic, her images are haunting.'
Elspeth Barker, INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY
'The spareness of the writing, leavened by an icicle-sharp sense of humour, makes
this book both difficult to put down and impossible to forget' IRISH TIMES
'This is her best and most moving book to date, because she puts her human self
into it, sassy and vulnerable'
Michèle Roberts, THE TIMES
'Exploring her genuinely horrific childhood and the strangeness of Antarctica,
Diski, an immensely cool writer, unravels both with superb understatement' NEW
STATESMAN
'Diski's brilliant account of her bleak childhood,
her breakdowns and her attempt to make sense of it all is funny, strange
and unforgettable' WOMAN'S JOURNAL
'Memoirs of family misery have become publishing clichés over the
past few years, but Diski's shines out for its wit, lack of self-pity and
strong interest
in survival' Helen Dunmore, EXPRESS
'This is the most unusual and beautiful of memoirs' OBSERVER
'Astonishing, harrowing, very funny, and always completely enthralling and brilliantly
written' MAIL ON SUNDAY |
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Don't (Granta 1998)
'Literate, witty, sad essays...Diski's
experience of being female, Jewish and depressed and her
habitually sceptical,
helplessly
humorous tone make for stimulating reading.'—Independent
‘She has a fine eye and ear for human details that make
the sublime ridiculous…her thought is sinuous, not slack,
provoked by a fathomless curiosity about human experience.’ Observer |
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A View From the Bed (Virago 2003)
This is a collection of wonderfully animated essays. In her
inimitable style, with sharp wit and idiosyncratic views,
Diski meditates on her own experiences,
an array of key historical figures and contemporary topics including her
ponderings on the thrill of guilt and the biblical role
of water in ‘Did Jesus
walk on water because he couldn’t swim?’, this is vintage Diski
‘ Grouped thematically under titles
like “Awkward Dames” and “Sex…” there’s
a good mix of longer pieces drawn from the London Review
of Books and shorter
journalism like “…And Shopping”, a year’s worth of columns
for the Sunday Times describing her thoughts as a con-sumer. It’s a delight
to read someone discussing subjects like this so engagingly without once de-generating
into either academic hieroglyphics or the inanity of lifestyle journalism.’ Independent
on Sunday |
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