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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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 (Sophie Ratcliffe in the New Statesman )
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 (The Herald )
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 (Mark Sanderson, Sunday Telegraph )
This is unique, and wholly wonderful (Stephanie Cross, Daily Telegraph )
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 (The Herald )
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 (Mark Sanderson, Sunday Telegraph )
This is unique, and wholly wonderful (Stephanie Cross, Daily Telegraph )
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From the award-winning, fabulously unique writer - comes a most unusual series of journeys from Lapland to New Zealand to Somerset. Now in paperback. 'A luminous, brilliantly witty account of the trials of seeking stillnes' Joanna Kavenna, Telegraph
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
By Sabina
Format:Paperback
Accompanied by the writings of Montaigne, Defoe, St. Augustine, Nietzsche and others, Jenny Diski asks herself questions such as 'What is the point?' and 'What happens when nothing happens?' as she travels about in her own head (keeping still) in a year of staying in New Zealand, on an isolated farm in the Quantock Hills, and herding reindeer in Northern Sweden. Her writing is full of vitality and wit, so I enjoyed the trip. There is a raw honesty about her observations of people, situations and her idiosyncratic responses to them. The chapters have titles such as 'On being far away,' 'On getting where you are going,' and 'On movement and stillness,' yet I was left wanting to go and travel with the Sami in Sweden (though maybe without the freezing night in the tent) and to sample thick reindeer slices roasted on birch twig skewers over a roaring fire, and washed down with lingonberry juice.
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