CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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Distant socialising
Writer Jan Woolf reflects on the benefit of talking among your selves during lockdown
WRESTLING WITH HER SELF: Julia Gu
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
THEY used to say that talking to yourself is the first sign of madness. Not at all, it’s a very sense-able thing to do.
But does one address oneself as “you” or “I?” Writer Ian McEwan pointed out that the self became fashionable late last century in the self-help universe, but Freud rattled his stick along the railings of the mind many years earlier, using mythological and religious constructs to define them.
In fact, there are many selves to talk to. There is your self and the one(s) others see but, in glorious isolation, they can be brought together and talk to each other. Which is what people in solitary confinement do to keep sane and to keep language honed and toned.
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JAN WOOLF is beguiled by the tempting notion that Freud psychoanalysed Hitler in a comedy that explores the vulnerability of a damaged individual
