Anne – Page 2 – Anne Whitehead

5 July 20245 July 2024

Spring

Sounding the Angel can now be accessed in full here. In a series of four blog posts, I introduce each of the four sections of the sound work. Today’s post discusses the third part of the work, ‘Spring’. You can listen to this section here. In this instalment, I focus on the participants’ experience of returning to The Angel after they had placed the memorial tribute there. I ask: What is the ongoing relation to the place?

Our first participant returned to The Angel one or two weeks later, to see what – if anything – remained of the tribute. On this occasion, the weather was fine and the site was busy, with bus trips and a group of people in the memorial garden. He had chosen the same time of the week to go back, and the man who had been there on the first occasion was out walking his dog again. As our participant expected, there was no trace left of his memorial tribute, and he took a photograph of the place where it had been. He found comfort in the knowledge that his wife would have approved, as well as in the idea of The Angel becoming her guardian.

Our second participant returned to the site with her mother and brother, and they hung tributes in the tree together. Whenever she speaks to her mother of visiting the tree, her mother always asks what is left from when they visited last. After her friend died of cancer, our participant commemorated her alongside her brother, as they had shared the same birthday. Her more recent tributes were not ribbons but flowers, in the colours of football teams where appropriate, because they ‘just . . . go back into the earth’. She has also left a five-pointed willow star, and five little brass bells, because five is a number with particular familial significance. The participant’s ritual at The Angel has changed over time, so that she now takes a little picnic and the playlist that she compiled for her friend when she was sick. On each visit, she takes photographs of the tree and shares them with her family and friends, reflecting that it is particularly important to her that those who live so far away know that her loved ones are still important to her. She has pinned the tree in her maps, and she describes it as having many lines of connection that radiate out across the world.

While our first participant saw the tribute as a singular event and our second participant described it as an evolving ritual, for both of them the act of returning to – and photographing – the site was both important and meaningful. The act was seen to be significant in terms of the approval of others – whether of the deceased, or of family members far away. The timing of the return to the memorial was also carefully considered, whether this was in terms of the time of the week or for the commemoration of a birthday.

This section of the sound piece incorporates birdsong from the trees at the memorial site. The field recordings are more lively and vibrant than in the winter months, with the chatter of visitors and the sounds of children playing audible alongside the traffic and the vibrations resonating through The Angel.

4 July 20244 July 2024

Winter

Sounding the Angel can now be accessed in full here. In a series of four blog posts, I introduce each of the four sections of the sound work. Today’s post discusses the second part of the work, ‘Winter’. You can listen to this section here.

This is the second of four posts that share the sound work, ‘Sounding the Angel’. My last post, ‘Autumn‘, focused on the participants’ relation to the Angel of the North, asking why they had come to leave a memorial tribute at the site. This post reflects on the second part of the sound piece, ‘Winter’, which focuses on the act of leaving the memorial tribute.

Our first participant explained that he was scattering ash in memory of his wife at different locations that had been of significance to her. One of the intended sites had been Sycamore Gap, on Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland, but the famous sycamore tree that was growing there had recently been chopped down. He was on his way to the National Arboretum of Scotland, to commemorate her amid the giant redwoods that she loved, when a rainstorm came on, so he stopped at The Angel instead. Even in the pouring rain, there was a man out walking his dog , and our participant reflected on the companionship offered by The Angel site – not only from the sculpture itself, but also from the visitors who are always there, and other memorial tributes that have been left in the trees. No other people were involved in the ritual, which was described as ‘a strictly intimate affair’ .

Our second participant also spoke of going to The Angel alone, to leave the tribute to her brother. Having come across clootie wells in Scotland, and the pieces of coloured cloth tied to the trees, she took the Christmas present ribbons and tied them to a tree in the copse, with the intention of adding to them on every visit, so that the tree would eventually look as if it was blossoming with new flowers. When she returned to the site, she found that some of the ribbons had gone, and also that the site was more crowded with tributes from other people. She found a different tree, on the perimeter of the memorial site, so that she could leave her tributes there, but this too was soon also in the middle of the expanding memorial. Where our first participant found comfort in the presence of the other tributes, our second participant preferred to be a little bit away from the main memorial garden. This inclination can also be seen in others when walking around the site, with some memorial tributes placed in trees that are a little distance away from the copse.

A resonance emerged between the two conversations as our participants reflected on what they had left. Speaking of the ash that formed the memorial tribute to his wife, our first participant reflected that ‘it would easily be blown away, or swept away, to be with the ghosts of the mineworkers that toiled below’. Likewise, our second participant found an unexpected comfort in her ribbons blowing away, observing: ‘wherever those ribbons are, [my brother] is there as well, and the love that we have for him and how we miss him and everything, those new places now know about [him]. I like the way mine has worked out, with the ribbons flying all over the country’. Both participants found solace in the wind’s dispersal of their tributes, seeing this as offering a connection to something larger – whether the mining community of the past, or different, unknown places, that had now become points of connection to the loss.

The impetus that led both participants to leave a tribute at The Angel was practical in nature. The first participant addressed the question of where to scatter his wife’s ashes, while the second participant faced the problem of how to grieve for her brother when there was no obvious place for her to go. The memorial site at The Angel is thereby connected to contemporary shifts in memorial practice, with a move away from the traditional cemetery plot, and with many mourners now located far away from the places that are associated with their dead. Following the coverage of this project in The Guardian, a number of people contacted me to suggest a connection between the memorial site and the tradition of rag or clootie trees. Here, one of our participants speaks of being inspired by Scottish clootie wells, and of consciously trying to recreate them at The Angel site. In my previous post, I reflected on whether the adaptation of the clootie tradition to the act of mourning might tend towards the use of more lasting or permanent fibres in the ribbon or cloth, but our participant finds comfort in the ephemerality of her tribute, as well as in the act of tying the ribbons itself.

In this section of the sound piece, you can hear recordings that David made with his contact microphones during Storm Babet. The heavy rain dropping onto the metal resonates through the structure, accompanying our first participant’s story of leaving the tribute for his wife at The Angel in the pouring rain, and suggestive both of the season and of tears.

3 July 20244 July 2024

Autumn

Sounding the Angel can now be accessed in full here. In a series of four blog posts, I introduce each of the four sections of the sound work. Today’s post discusses the first part of the work, ‘Autumn’. You can listen to this section here.

Today’s post introduces the first section of our sound piece, ‘Sounding the Angel’. The work has been divided into four sections, reflecting the project’s movement through the year from autumn 2023 through to summer 2024. For each of the seasons, you can hear samples from the field recordings that David made on site at that time of the year. In this section, you can hear passing traffic, recordings of the vibrations passing through The Angel, and samples from an autumn dawn chorus from the trees. ‘Autumn’ captures the participants’ previous associations with the site, and what The Angel means to them.

The two participants have very different relationships with The Angel of the North. Our first participant, who commemorated his wife by scattering some of her ashes at The Angel, described how the sculpture had threaded through their lives together. He describes his wife as ‘a Gateshead lass born and bred’, and speaks of her as an ardent defender of the sculpture when it was first proposed. The couple met and courted when they worked at a factory in the Team Valley – a site which now lies in the shadow of The Angel. After their marriage, he and his wife were both active in supporting the mineworkers during the strikes in the 1980s, he as a trade union organiser and she as a treasurer. At his wife’s funeral, the colliery band made a special recorded performance of her favourite tune, and her extensive collection of signature scarves was given away to people attending the funeral, with two of them then being tied to the top of local banner at the next Miners’ Gala Day procession.

Our second participant is South African, and she recalls vividly her first sight of The Angel, travelling north with her husband from Reading, where they were then living, to visit his family. Looking up from the road map, it seemed to her that The Angel filled the whole front screen of the car, and she describes the event as a ‘special moment’. Such was the impact of The Angel on her that our participant took her parents to see it when they visited from South Africa, and the sculpture had the same effect on them – especially her father, who was energised as he went up the hill towards it. It was on a separate occasion that the participant first registered the memorial site in the trees. Her friend was visiting and she spotted the memorials in the trees. When the participant’s brother died later that same year, she had no grave to visit and no places nearby that they had visited together. Her thoughts then returned to the memorial site. Her friend was later diagnosed with cancer, and The Angel became associated with her, too, because they had visited together. The memorial site helped the participant to feel connected to her friend and her brother after their deaths.

Even though the stories are very different in terms of the participants’ connection to The Angel, notable similarities emerged. For both participants, The Angel is comforting because it is constantly visible – on the news, on postcards, on stickers, and even on the inside pages of a passport. The second participant remarks that, even in South Africa, her parents see The Angel sometimes on TV or on a picture. The participants both also speak of their fondness for The Angel, which is associated with particular parts of the sculpture. The first participant remembers his wife always commenting on the shapeliness of The Angel’s bum and calves whenever she passed. The second participant speaks of the family nickname for The Angel – the ‘rusty bird’ – and of her love for The Angel’s wings.

The most striking resonance across the stories lies in the participants ‘ connection with the mining history of the site. I have already outlined the deep personal history that links the first participant, and his wife, to mineworking in the local area. Accounting for why her father was so energised by the site, the second participant explains that he used to work in the gold mines in South Africa. The sculpture was meaningful to him because it was built over a mine, and he spoke about the foundations of the sculpture extending deep underground. He observed to his daughter that ‘there must be people who died in the mines’, and that ‘The Angel is a memorial over them too’.

It is clear from our two conversations that The Angel has multiple layers of personal significance for both project participants, and that its associations also extend to the people memorialised. The iconic nature of The Angel means that there are constant reminders of the site in everyday life. The Angel’s presence as a memorial to mining and mineworkers is significant for both participants, both of whom have family connections to the mining industry.

28 June 202428 June 2024

Arches

Next week sees the installation of our sound piece in the Arches that mark the entrance to the main quadrangle of Newcastle University. Built in 1911 from a donation by north-east mining magnate John Bell Simpson, the brick structure now houses the Arches Sound Project, which projects four-track audio pieces through the microphones that have been installed in each of its corners. Passers-by can sit on the benches under the Arches to listen to the sound works in full, or they might encounter fragments of them as they walk through, whether to visit the campus or to cut through it to the Royal Victoria Infirmary beyond.

In the area just in front of the Arches, Antony Gormley’s Clasp has been installed, a semi- abstract sculpture that depicts two people embracing. The sculpture was installed on this site to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of The Angel in Gateshead, and our project both recognises and reinforces the line of connection between the two. Those listening to Sounding the Angel can also see the Clasp sculpture, so that the two works are brought into a new conversation with each other.

Turning to look in the opposite direction, one of the trees that has been planted immediately behind the Arches is a handkerchief or ghost tree, named after its beautiful, white flower-like bracts that flutter in the breeze, resembling innumerable pocket handkerchiefs. The bracts have now mostly fallen from the tree and been dispersed by the wind, which resonates with how the memorial tributes are described by participants in the sound work.

The installation, which lasts 30 minutes, is played on the hour every hour from 6am – 10pm, from 1-7 July. It comprises four parts, organized according to the seasons, and you can hear two counterpointed conversations with participants who have left memorial tributes at The Angel. These are combined with field recordings from the site across the seasons, documenting the sounds of nature and the vibrations resonating through The Angel itself. The piece is punctuated by a loud boom that was made by the metal of the Angel contracting after the heat of a summer’s day.

25 June 202428 June 2024

Recording Studio

I spent this morning in the recording studio with David, editing the draft version of the sound piece. It was wonderful to hear the different layers of sound that David had built into the work, and the creative ways in which he was using the recordings we had made on site.

The photograph of David’s computer screen below gives a visual score for the layering of sound in the piece. The top layers represent the three voices in the project – mine and the two participants – ; the layers beneath represent the resonances of the Angel, which run throughout the piece, and the sounds of the traffic and the wind; and the lower levels are the sounds of birdsong, leaves in the trees, and grass whispering in the wind.

The addition of the field recordings to the recorded voices gives the words of the participants additional resonance, as David marked the moments in the conversations when they had made reference to weather or particular sounds, and enhanced them through recorded sound. The work is divided into four sections, corresponding to the seasons, and David used the contact microphone recording of the interior of The Angel for the relevant season. Listening to them in sequence, it was remarkable how much the vibrations from The Angel differed in tone across the year, with the winter recordings shaped by the violent wind and rain of the storms, and the summer recordings more vibrant and lively, capturing the muffled sounds of children playing and visitors chatting nearby.

The sound piece also captures a few memorable moments of the field recordings. From our summer visit to The Angel, David built in the song of the blackbird that I recorded singing from the top of a tree in the copse, as well as my recording of my own footsteps. The geophone captured the boom of The Angel contracting, and David used the sound to punctuate the sections of the work, like the regular tolling of a bell. David’s visit to The Angel to record during Storm Babet produced the echoing of the raindrops from the surface of the sculpture that can be heard in the Winter section of the piece.

The continual drone of The Angel (shown in pink above) reminded me of David’s recordings of the pithead at Easington Colliery, in its haunting evocation of the former mining communities. In our sound piece, it accompanies (and expands) the participants’ associations of The Angel sculpture with the mineworkers who had toiled beneath.

The sound piece will be installed in The Arches on the main campus at Newcastle University on Monday 1 July and will play from 1-7 July.

14 June 202414 June 2024

Angels

Unsurprisingly, angels represent a common motif connecting many of the tributes left at the memorial site. The host of miniature angels hanging from the trees are scaled-down versions of Antony Gormley’s sculpture, and some are even direct representations of The Angel of the North.

The angels come in a range of different materials. Some have been knitted or crocheted.

Some are made from wood.

Others are made from plastic.

Many of these angel tributes are repurposed Christmas decorations, which have been chosen as memorial tributes because of their significance to the site.

Looking more closely at what is written on or about angels on the tributes can bring us closer to what they might mean for those who have commemorated loved ones here. Many notes left in the trees refer to The Angel as a guardian presence, watching over loved ones. The idea of a guardian angel watching over the dead can also be seen on some of the tributes.

In the photograph below, the Angels referred to as watching over the dead are both heavenly and material in form, given that The Angel of the North stands directly above the tree from which the tribute has been hung.

The figure of the angel baby is often used in baby loss memorials, and the angel here represents or stands in for the deceased.

Wooden heart with inscription tied to branch — Photo credit: Anne Whitehead

This idea is echoed in other tributes. Angels might be inscribed with the name of the person who is being commemorated.

Or the person might be described as an ongoing guardian presence for the living.

In the photograph above, wings stand as a shorthand for the angel figure. Feathers also serve this function, and both images are prevalent in the tributes left at the site.

Angels clearly represent a source of comfort for those who leave tributes in the memorial garden, and we can presume that the solace offered by The Angel of the North initially drew them to commemorate their loved ones there. Looking closer at the tributes, we can find some variation in the ways in which angels offer meaning in the face of death. For some mourners, it is the idea – made concrete in The Angel – that their loved ones are not alone and have a guardian presence nearby. For others, angels are expressive of a continued bond with a friend or relative, who is seen as a guardian angel watching over the living. The angel figure has a particular cultural resonance in the context of baby loss, offering grieving families a recognizable way to express their grief.

6 June 20246 June 2024

June

Grass against blue ground — Image Credit: Anne Whitehead

This post forms part of a monthly series that documents the plants growing at The Angel of the North through a series of cyanotypes.

The month of June has brought into flower the different grasses that grow in the field on which The Angel of the North stands. Attending to these plants requires a different scale of vision from looking at The Angel, as well as adjusting the gaze downward. Cyanotypes of the grasses bring out the sculptural beauty of their forms, which are easily overlooked.

I wrote in my post on the month of May about the significance for the memorial site of dwelling with the ordinariness of things, and this month’s homage to the grasses that grow there continues in this vein. These plants are not exceptional or extraordinary, but looking at them closely reveals their distinctive beauty. I have often used the term grassroots memorial to describe the memorial in the trees at The Angel. This phrase, which registers that the memorial site is rooted in the spontaneous, collective activities of ordinary people, has its origin in the roots of grasses as a fundamental layer from which growth takes place.

The Sounding the Angel project documents the memorial site through sound. I have written in this blog of the rustling of the leaves in the trees as one of the defining sounds of the memorial site in the summer months. Although less audible, the whispering of the grasses can also be heard alongside them, as they variously bend or shake in the wind.

The images of the grasses above have all been made using the dry cyanotype method, which involves placing the plant onto paper when the chemicals that develop the image have dried. The grace and elegance of these cyanotypes prompted me also to develop images of the grasses using the wet cyanotype method, which I have described in a previous post.

This technique enables a greater range of effects, even if it is less predictable in outcome.

This image captures the feel of the grasses swaying in the wind, and turmeric sprinkled onto the wet paper enhances its sense of life and movement.

Here, the textured background has been created by placing a layer of cling film onto the glass during the exposure of the image.

Here’s another variation, which combines the two techniques. The pooling of vinegar spray on the cling film has caused a rich variety of blues to emerge.

The cyanotype methods differ in their effects, but they both capture the structural beauty of the grasses. These plants define the site of The Angel in June, and this post both captures and celebrates the range of different species that grow there.

3 June 20243 June 2024

Birth Rites Collection

Marie Brett, ‘Anamnesis’, Cork: Crawford Art Gallery, 2013.

Last week the Newcastle University Medical Humanities Network hosted Helen Knowles to speak about the Birth Rites Collection. An artist and curator, Knowles built up the Collection, which is the only collection of contemporary artwork dedicated to the subject of childbirth. Founded in 2009 and currently housed at the University of Kent, the Collection was formerly held at King’s College, London.

Knowles spoke about the history of the Collection, which seeks to encourage debate and increase awareness of practices of childbirth. She addressed questions of curation, and of the display of artworks that represent sensitive subject matter. She then presented a virtual tour of the Collection, highlighting and discussing a number of its key works.

The first artwork on the tour concerned the subject of baby loss. Bella Milroy’s Sharing the Gift From Elanor addressed the artist’s relationship with her older sister, who died shortly after birth. The work comprises a photograph taken on the hospital ward just after Elanor’s birth. Beneath this photograph is a reproduction of the same image, made by Milroy nearly thirty years later. The two images ask us to register the differences between them. The photograph captures those who were present to witness Elanor’s brief life, and provokes remembrance for those who were there. The reproduction emphasizes that Milroy’s access to the scene is secondary, and that she can only imagine rather than remember her sister.

Helen Knowles and Francesca Granato, ‘Conception’, 2008. Photo credit: Anne Whitehead

Other pieces in the Collection that address baby loss acted as key reference points for our own project. Knowles’ work is represented in the Collection through the printed wallpaper, Conception. From a distance, the pattern looks like an art-nouveau design, but close up it becomes apparent that it depicts scientific details of the reproductive organs. The wallpaper was on display at the Whitworth Art Gallery’s exhibition Still Parents: Life After Baby Loss, which was showing when we worked on the project, and which both Kate and I visited. Every aspect of the exhibition, from curation to interpretation, had been informed by the project participants; namely, parents who had experienced the loss of a baby during pregnancy or just after birth.

Working with professional artists, the Still Parents project encouraged participants to explore their experiences through creativity. Memory boxes displayed around the walls contained intimate objects that were associated with the loss.

It was moving to see how these objects were transformed across different media. This pair of shoes was worked into clay and fired as decoration on a pot.

The shoes were etched onto paper.

They were embroidered onto cloth.

And they became part of a wallpaper pattern, combined with a little woolly hat from a different memory box.

Although our project worked with materials that were more indirectly associated with the loss, the transformation of those materials into ink, drawings, and the digital medium of film was based in the same process of enabling parents to explore their grief through creativity.

Marie Brett’s Anamnesis: The Amulet also forms part of the Birth Rites Collection. Developed in partnership with three Irish maternity hospitals, Brett’s project explored the amulet as an object that holds particular resonance in the context of pregnancy and infant loss. The exhibition displayed ten photographs of mementoes connected to lost infants, which were matched with audio clips of the parents speaking. The Collection holds the tables on which the photographs were displayed, the framed prints, and the CDs and headphone sets.

The words of the parents were very personal (see the pages from the exhibition catalogue, at the head of this post), yet Brett’s decision to place them in conversation with one another was suggestive of the power of objects in the context of grief. Many of the mementoes were kept in a safe space at home and brought out for private rituals of remembrance. In the Irish context, the public display of images of these objects challenged long-standing cultural taboos about infant death. I have written in previous posts about the cillini, clandestine burial sites across Ireland where babies’ bodies were buried in secrecy, often at night. The project’s sharing of stories offers parents the opportunities to talk about their children, and opens up a public conversation around their denied memories.

As I type these words, I have on the desk in front of me the publicity flyer and catalogue for Brett’s exhibition, which were given to me by Judith Rankin when we first discussed collaborating on our project. Although we were not working in the cultural context of Ireland, the experience of losing a twin at birth still remains largely silent in the broader conversation around pregnancy and infant loss.

It was wonderful to learn from Helen about the Birth Rites Collection, as well as to encounter both new and familiar artworks that chimed with our project on baby loss.

Many thanks to Olivia Turner for organizing the workshop, and to the Newcastle University Institutes of Humanities and Arts Practice for supporting the event.

24 May 202424 May 2024

Remembering a daughter

In a recent post, I observed that some of the trees in the memorial at The Angel have been marked as the ‘plot’ of an individual family, making the site feel increasingly like a more formalised cemetery or graveyard. At the heart of the wooded copse, immediately beneath The Angel, an alder tree has been surrounded by a small wooden fence and a metal plaque has been placed into the ground, inscribed with the name of a family’s daughter. This tree at the centre of the memorial garden, which commemorates a little girl, represents for me the emotional heart of the site.

I do not know the girl’s surname, or her story. I only know her through this memorial tree. Over the few years that I have visited the memorial site at The Angel, the child’s family have decorated the tree each year on her birthday with tokens of the gifts they would have given her, including a birthday balloon which records that she would have been three, and then four, years old. I have found it moving to witness these tributes, both because of the parents’ ongoing ritual of remembrance, and because of the evident care with which the objects have been chosen and placed. The annual decoration of the tree takes place in the winter months, and the bare branches of the alders mean that The Angel is clearly visible above.

This tree raises questions for me about how I represent the memorials at The Angel, which are at once both public and private. The tree is so central to the memorial site – both physically and emotionally – that I do not feel I can tell the story of the grassroots memorial without documenting it. At the same time, there is a sensitivity in relation to it, because of the nature of the grief that it represents.

In an earlier post, I wrote of artist Miriam de Burca, whose work records the cillini: memorial sites in Ireland, which were burial grounds for those deemed unworthy of an official grave, including babies and children who had died before baptism. De Burca makes meticulous and detailed drawings of clods of earth from these remote and hidden sites, which she digs up, draws in her studio, and then returns to the site once the drawing has been made. De Burca’s drawing represents not only an act of recording, but also a quality of attention. The drawing takes time – it is not the instant image of the photograph – and it requires a sustained and careful process of observation.

Following de Burca’s lead, I have chosen to draw the tributes on this tree, with each pencil sketch taking several hours to complete. I hope that these works, which record just a selection of the many objects left on the tree, both recognise and honour a family’s acts of love and remembrance.

I have pointed out in a previous post that, while objects that are left on The Angel sculpture tend to be moved, the tributes left in the trees usually remain in place, disturbed only by the wind. This is true of the objects suspended from this tree, which visitors will often hang from its branches again if they are blown to the ground. On a recent visit, a toy monkey, which had been left at the side of the path leading out of the trees and which was getting muddy in the rain, had been placed in the fork made by two branches of the tree. This gesture protected the toy, and its positioning suggested that other visitors had also been moved by the memorial, wishing to leave their own gift for the little girl alongside those of her family.

In a moving piece of writing, Marcus Weaver-Hightower – the father of a stillborn baby, Matilda – reflects on the importance of things to parents who experience baby loss. He writes that material objects connected to the baby can help parents to resist ‘a pressure from others to forget (get over it)’, as well as offering a focus when there is ‘a lack of adequate quantities of memories and few people who share these memories’ (476). Weaver-Hightower adds that some parents actively create memories by buying new toys and other baby things, which can ‘provoke memory’, and which ‘might be kept in private or publicly displayed’ (476). His words chime with the memorial rituals that I have observed at the tree beneath The Angel, and my drawings of some of the tributes that have been left there seek to register their affective power, not only for the family but also for those who visit the site and encounter them.

References

Marcus Weaver-Hightower, ‘Waltzing Matilda: An Ethnography of a Father’s Stillbirth’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 41.4 (2012), 462-91.

13 May 202413 May 2024

International Booker Prize

I was delighted to receive a recent invitation from Anna Walker, senior arts and culture editor at The Conversation, to contribute to a review piece of the books on the shortlist for the International Booker Prize 2024. I am an admirer of the International Booker not only for its commitment to literature in translation, but also for its explicit recognition of the translator, who shares half the prize with the author. This year, the judging panel was chaired by Eleanor Wachtel, and included poet Natalie Diaz and artist William Kentridge.

I was asked to review Jente Posthuma’s What I’d Rather Not Think About, which was translated from the Dutch by Sarah Timmer Harvey. Readers of this blog will recognise my research interests reflected in the work, which documents the grief process of a younger twin following the suicide of her brother. Posthuma’s novel was published in the Netherlands in 2020 and was shortlisted for the European Union Prize for Literature in 2021. Her first novel, People Without Charisma, was published in 2016, also to wide critical acclaim.

Given its subject matter, What I’d Rather Not Think About is surprisingly readable, in part because of its tone. The narrator – known to us only as Two because she was the second born – reflects with wry humour on her situation. The book also reads as a series of interconnected flash fictions. It came as no surprise to read that Posthuma is a fan of American short story writer Lydia Davis: her prose echoes Davis’s precision, and Posthuma also shares Davis’s interest in probing questions of intimacy and distance. The brevity and concision of both writers focuses our attention on what is unsaid, as much as on what is expressed.

The winner of this year’s International Booker Prize will be revealed at a ceremony held in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, on Tuesday 21 May.

The article in The Conversation, which contains mini reviews of each of the shortlisted novels, can be accessed here.