The book:
The authors of this month’s book - one a writer, the other a bibliotherapist - have created a playful, yet truly informative and inspiring reference book for hundreds of illnesses and woes, the solution to all being literature. Fear of death? Try One Hundred Years of Solitude!
The Novel Cure is packed with amusing and whimsical recommendations, but as the keenly literate authors know, a novel can change your mood, outlook and even life, if read at the right moment (‘One sheds one’s sickness in books’ - D.H. Lawrence).
We’ve picked The Novel Cure not just because of its superb content, but because it’s an apothecary of future reading. If you’re anything like us, you will be moved to go and read some of the many suggestions in there (and forget about any ailment on the way!). Hypochondriacs, prepare to put up more bookshelves.
What the Guardian thought:
It has taken a while for my health board to realise the benefits of bibliotherapy, but the idea is an old one. Seneca wrote his Consolation to Marcia almost two thousand years ago, but it is still powerful advice for a mother mourning the death of her son. Robert Burton’s sprawling Anatomy of Melancholy is an intermittently helpful, but always involving, series of meditations on sadness and its alleviations. Absurd as it sounds, books like these would now be crammed into a lumpy genre called “literary non-fiction”, but in his Religion for Atheists Alain de Botton makes the claim that since the latter half of the 19th century we’ve turned to fiction rather than non-fiction to encourage self-examination. “English literature now has a triple function,” he quotes George Stuart Gordon, “to delight and instruct us, but also, and above all, to save our souls and heal the State.”
At the outset Berthoud and Elderkin make it clear that they are not going to make any distinction between emotional and physical pain; they are as interested in literature that will help you heal a broken leg as much as a broken heart. Each ailment is followed by a short precis, occasionally written as a parody of the book recommended. Search out those ailments you have painful experience of (constipation perhaps? Shantaram), or just flick through until something catches your eye (itchy teeth? Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King). An index of authors lets you seek out your darlings and cross reference them with the ailments they’ve been prescribed for. The result is more bibliophilia than bibliotherapy; an exuberant pageant of literary fiction and a celebration of the possibilities of the novel.
Unfortunately for my patient, there is no entry for anguish (perhaps he wasn’t being specific enough; there is “angst, existential” – Hesse’s Siddhartha – and “angst, teenage” – Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, of course). In his 1960s masterpiece A Fortunate Man, in which he followed the daily work of a GP, novelist and essayist John Berger asked how it is possible for a clinician to face up to the anguish at the heart of human life: “I speak of the anguish of dying, of loss, of fear, of loneliness, of being desperately beside oneself, of the sense of futility.” The Novel Cure is at its best when it tackles these fundamental questions, and many of its titles will be added to my bibliotherapy list.
Gavin Francis - Read the full review
If you liked this, then try:
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The Book of Human Emotions by Tiffany Watt-Smith
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The Year of Reading Dangerously by Andy Miller
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Public Library and Other Stories by Ali Smith
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