It takes a special kind of writer to pull off a modern interpretation of Hamlet narrated by a sardonic foetus from inside a womb. Fortunately, according to reviewers of his latest novel, Ian McEwan is one, and Nutshell is a hit. “Brilliantly brazen … a stroke of genius,” wrote Claire Lowdon in the Sunday Times. “McEwan is a pentathlete at the top of his game, doing several very different things equally well. Current literary culture rarely awards gold medals for comedy, but this is one performance – agile, muscular, swift – you should not miss.” Others were more guarded. “The conceit of a foetus racked by conscience is not the only part of this novel that is hard to take entirely seriously,” wrote Robert Douglas-Fairhurst in the Times, referring to “narrative detail that papers over the cracks”. Only John Harding in the Daily Mail thought that “the literary device of an unborn baby narrating a novel from the womb is hardly original”. Most agreed with the Mail on Sunday’s Hephzibah Anderson: “Thanks to the author’s linguistic chops, it’s a creative gamble that pays off brilliantly … Witty and gently tragic, this short yet utterly bewitching novel is an ode to humanity’s beauty, selfishness and inextinguishable longing.”
Jungian scholars are also prone to interesting interpretations of Hamlet, but Catrine Clay turns her focus on the psychiatrist’s own marriage in Labyrinths: Emma Jung, Her Marriage to Carl and the Early Years of Psychoanalysis. The Sunday Times’ John Carey was disappointed that “Clay does not offer … any clear account of Jung’s ideas, or any consideration of why they seemed, and have continued to seem, important … Not to attempt some kind of understanding along these lines is, in the end, unfair to Emma. For without it her dedication to Jung’s ideas, for which she sacrificed so much, seems inexplicable.” However, Paula Byrne in the Times found that Clay “finally gives a voice to Emma … and she doesn’t get too carried away by the fascinating friendship and then the rift between Jung and Freud”, and Lucy Scholes in the Observer wrote: “Labyrinths is the first mainstream publication to recognise the value of Emma’s contributions as a practitioner of analytical psychology, but, more importantly, to acknowledge the integral role she played in the discipline’s development.”
The Flâneuse is a character emerging from the shadow of her male counterpart, according to Lauren Elkin’s book. In the New Statesman, Erica Wagner appreciated this “intense meditation on what it means to be a woman and walk out in the world”, especially “the consolation it offers to those of us who never feel quite at home”. For the Daily Telegraph’s Gaby Wood, “it meanders, as the theoretical flâneuse of its title would … Reading Flâneuse feels like walking: you peer down textual alleyways and opt for brief detours.” Philippa Stockley, in the London Evening Standard, found the book to be “well researched, larded with examples … held together, sometimes superfluously, by personal experience of rambling in various cities, and charts women artists’ road to walking freely – though still sometimes with unwanted attention. [It] successfully paints women back into the city and demonstrates that things have improved. Elkin reboots the appetite to go walking and thinking in the city, which can only be a good thing.”
