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‘I was so absorbed by her writing it was unreal . . . I find myself hungry to find the next morsel of who Jenny was and what her life was like’ EMILIA CLARKE (on Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told?)
Jenny Diski’s attempt to keep still and mentally idle resulted in a year in which she travelled to New Zealand, spent two months almost alone in a cottage in the country and visited the Sámi people of Lapland. Diski fails to keep still and, like the philosopher Montaigne, keeps a record of her ramblings both mental and physical hoping as he did in time to make her mind ashamed of itself. Interspersed with ill-tempered descriptions of these trips are digressions on the subject of her sore foot; her childhood desire for ‘a condition’, thoughts about growing older, spiders, fundamentalism and the problems of keeping warm.
Jenny Diski’s attempt to keep still and mentally idle resulted in a year in which she travelled to New Zealand, spent two months almost alone in a cottage in the country and visited the Sámi people of Lapland. Diski fails to keep still and, like the philosopher Montaigne, keeps a record of her ramblings both mental and physical hoping as he did in time to make her mind ashamed of itself. Interspersed with ill-tempered descriptions of these trips are digressions on the subject of her sore foot; her childhood desire for ‘a condition’, thoughts about growing older, spiders, fundamentalism and the problems of keeping warm.
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Reviews
This is unique, and wholly wonderful
Diski epitomises the pleasure of travelling alone... She seeks a mental inertia yet her book proves that, even when idling, the mind is always at work, remembering, recording, revising
Sometimes, as though she can't help it, Diski slips very enjoyably into a travel-writer mode, but On Trying to Keep Still is really a voyage round the author's head. It's a brave and moving admission of a way of life that society isn't geared up to cope
While much of the collection revolves around Diski's attempt to exercise her stupor to its fullest degree, there is nothing lazy about her writing. Combining philosophy with travelogue and personal memoir - in particular, memories of her difficult childhood - On Trying to Keep Still is unflaggingly engaging. It is also very funny