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Who’s afraid of realism?

London Review of Books
  • 5.0 (2)
  • Books
  • Updated Monthly

What’s the difference between realism and the real? James Wood look at novels and short stories from Flaubert and Dostoevsky up to contemporary writers including Amit Chaudhuri and Gwendoline Riley as he examines the uncertain line between artifice and artificiality and the techniques and effects used in fiction to achieve the lifelike. James Wood is a contributor to the London Review of Books, staff writer at The New Yorker and Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard University. His books include ‘How Fiction Works’, ‘The Fun Stuff’ and ‘The Broken Estate’. Non-subscribers will only hear extracts from the episodes. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrwaor Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingswaor Books featured in the series: Gustav Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Penguin Classics, trans. Geoffrey Wall) Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground (Vintage Classics, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky) Three stories by Anton Chekhov (UK: Bravo Ltd., from Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky; USA: same edition, Modern Library) Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich (Vintage, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky) Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (UK: Penguin Modern Classics; USA: Mariner Books Classics) Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark (UK: Penguin Modern Classics; USA: Norton) Saul Bellow, Seize The Day (Penguin Modern Classics) Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin (UK: Penguin Modern Classics; USA: Vintage) Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (UK: Penguin Modern Classics; USA: Harper Perennial Modern Classics) Dag Solstad, Shyness & Dignity (Vintage, trans. Sverre Lyngstad) Amit Chaudhuri, Afternoon Raag (UK: Faber and Faber, USA: New York Review Books Classics) Gwendoline Riley, My Phantoms (UK: Granta Books; USA: New York Review Books Classics)

Episodes

  1. May 27

    ‘Mrs Dalloway’ by Virginia Woolf

    In August 1923, halfway through writing ‘Mrs Dalloway’, Virginia Woolf recorded a new idea in her diary: she would ‘dig out beautiful caves’ behind her characters, and ‘the caves shall connect, and each comes to daylight at the present moment’. This was Woolf’s ‘tunnelling process’, a transformative approach that led to the novel's celebrated modernist innovations, with its depiction a group of circulating consciousnesses in London over the course of one day. But underlying these innovations are the techniques of 19th-century realism, and in this episode James Wood explores what Woolf owes to Dickens and Flaubert, and the ways she breaks down these certainties to arrive at the ultimate unknowability of character. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrwaor Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingswaor Read more the LRB: Jacqueline Rose on Woolf: https://lrb.me/realismep601 Gillian Beer on Woolf‘s essays: https://lrb.me/realismep602 David Trotter on ‘Mrs Dalloway’: https://lrb.me/realismep603

    20 min
  2. ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’ by Leo Tolstoy

    Apr 27

    ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’ by Leo Tolstoy

    In the late 1870s, shortly after the publication of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy experienced what might be described today as a midlife crisis. In his short autobiographical book ‘A Confession’, finished in 1880, he questioned what meaning there is in life that is not annihilated by the inevitability of death. His answer was to live according to God’s law, a realisation that shaped that rest of his life and writing, and guides the story of his late masterpiece, ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’ (1886). To discuss ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich‘ and its place both in Tolstoy’s work and the development of realism, James is joined by the novelist Elif Batuman. They consider the way Tolstoy takes up Flaubert’s contempt for bourgeois life and strips it down to a spare fable of delusion and awakening, and why the unique authority of his style has proved so resistant to the critiques of realism in the 20th century. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrwaor Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingswaor Read more in the LRB: Michael Wood on War and Peace: ⁠https://lrb.me/realismep501⁠ James Meek on the death of Tolstoy: ⁠https://lrb.me/realismep502⁠ John Bayley on Tolstoy's diaries: ⁠https://lrb.me/realismep503⁠

    23 min

  3. Mar 30

    Three stories by Anton Chekhov

    ‘Instead of sheets – dirty tablecloths.’ The notebooks of Anton Chekhov are full of enigmatic observations such as this, the unexplained details that suggest a whole scene, short story or character. When asked by an actor how he should play the role of Trigorin in The Seagull, Chekhov simply answered: ‘he wears checked trousers’. As James Wood argues, this mastery of the telling detail is central to Chekhov’s radical realism. Unlike Flaubert and Ibsen, Chekhov sought to avoid imposing authorial meaning or irony, instead handing over perception to his characters. In this episode, James looks at three of Chekhov’s stories, ‘Gusev’ (1890), ‘The Bishop’ (1902) and ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ (1899), and the ways in which each seeks to curb the judgment or expectations of the reader to foreground the experiences of his characters, even beyond death. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrwaor Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingswaor Further reading in the LRB: John Bayley on Chekhov's stories: https://lrb.me/realismep401 Donald Rayfield on Chekhov's love letters: https://lrb.me/realismep402 Joseph Frank on Chekhov's life: https://lrb.me/realismep403 James Wood on Chekhov's life: https://lrb.me/realismep404

    23 min

  4. Mar 2

    ‘Notes from Underground’ by Fyodor Dostoevsky

    Dostoevsky’s 1864 novella doesn’t contain the descriptive detail, impersonal narration or many other features of 19th-century realism established by Flaubert. The book’s two-part structure, which starts with a 40-year-old’s furious rant against rationalism and moves on to present three humiliating episodes from his earlier life, offers no kind of conclusion. Instead, it is the unbearable moments of psychological truth that make ‘Notes from Underground’ a revolutionary development in the history of realism. In this episode, James Wood is joined by the novelist and critic Adam Thirlwell to consider Dostoevsky’s mastery of the inner life and the experiences that shaped his hostility to rational egoism, from being subjected to a mock execution and four years in a Siberian prison camp to his reading of Hegel and a visit to London’s Crystal Palace. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrwaor Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingswaor Read more in the LRB on Dostoevsky: John Bayley: https://lrb.me/realismep301 Daniel Soar: https://lrb.me/realismep302 Michael Wood: https://lrb.me/realismep303

    20 min

  5. Feb 2

    ‘Madame Bovary’ by Gustave Flaubert (part two)

    ‘He opened him up and found nothing.’ These are the doctor’s findings at Charles Bovary’s autopsy near the end of 'Madame Bovary'. Taken on its own, it’s a simple medical observation. In the context of Emma Bovary’s tragic story, it serves as a condemnation not just of Charles’s emptiness but the whole provincial world Flaubert has been describing. In the second part of his analysis of ‘Madame Bovary’, James Wood considers the major episodes leading to Emma’s death and argues that what made Flaubert’s realism dangerous was not its depictions of infidelity, but its use of cliché to expose French bourgeois lives constructed entirely of received ideas and second-hand emotions. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrwaor Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingswaor Further reading in the LRB: Julian Barnes on translations of ‘Madame Bovary’: ⁠https://lrb.me/realismep201⁠ Michael Wood on ‘Sentimental Education’: ⁠https://lrb.me/realismep202⁠

    10 min

  6. Jan 5

    ‘Madame Bovary’ by Gustave Flaubert (part one)

    Gustave Flaubert recalled in a letter that the critic Sainte-Beuve compared his style to a surgeon’s scalpel, an image taken from 'Madame Bovary'. This was not a compliment: Sainte-Beuve was anxious about the ambition of Flaubert’s ‘realism’ to cut to the bone of its characters and society at large. Karl Marx, on the other hand, praised realist writers who ‘issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists, and moralists put together’. In the first episode of his new series, James Wood considers the fears and criticisms that have dogged realism from its emergence in the 19th century through its long history of transformations up to the present day. He examines the ways in which Flaubert used detail (both significant and significantly insignificant), impersonal narration, lifelike dialogue and free indirect style to create realism’s essential grammar. This is part one of James’s analysis of 'Madame Bovary', going up to the moment that Emma meets Rodolphe Boulanger. He uses Geoffrey Wall's translation, published by Penguin Classics. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrwaor Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingswaor Read more in the LRB: Julian Barnes: Flaubert at Two Hundred https://lrb.me/realismep101 Two Letters from Flaubert to Colet: https://lrb.me/realismep102 Tim Parks on Flaubert's life: https://lrb.me/realismep103

    20 min

  7. Jan 1

    Introducing ‘Who’s afraid of realism?’

    What’s the difference between realism and the real? James Wood looks at novels and short stories from Flaubert and Dostoevsky up to contemporary writers including Amit Chaudhuri and Gwendoline Riley as he examines the uncertain line between artifice and artificiality and the techniques and effects used in fiction to achieve the lifelike. James Wood is a contributor to the London Review of Books, staff writer at The New Yorker and Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard University. His books include ‘How Fiction Works’, ‘The Fun Stuff’ and ‘The Broken Estate’. Non-subscribers will only hear extracts from the episodes. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrwaor Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingswaor Books featured in the series: Gustav Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Penguin Classics, trans. Geoffrey Wall) Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground (Vintage Classics, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky) Three stories by Anton Chekhov (UK: Bravo Ltd., from Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky; USA: same edition, Modern Library) Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich (Vintage, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky) Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (UK: Penguin Modern Classics; USA: Mariner Books Classics) Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark (UK: Penguin Modern Classics; USA: Norton) Saul Bellow, Seize The Day (Penguin Modern Classics) Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin (UK: Penguin Modern Classics; USA: Vintage) Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (UK: Penguin Modern Classics; USA: Harper Perennial Modern Classics) Dag Solstad, Shyness & Dignity (Vintage, trans. Sverre Lyngstad) Amit Chaudhuri, Afternoon Raag (UK: Faber and Faber, USA: New York Review Books Classics) Gwendoline Riley, My Phantoms (UK: Granta Books; USA: New York Review Books Classics)

    2 min

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Ratings & Reviews

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About

What’s the difference between realism and the real? James Wood look at novels and short stories from Flaubert and Dostoevsky up to contemporary writers including Amit Chaudhuri and Gwendoline Riley as he examines the uncertain line between artifice and artificiality and the techniques and effects used in fiction to achieve the lifelike. James Wood is a contributor to the London Review of Books, staff writer at The New Yorker and Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard University. His books include ‘How Fiction Works’, ‘The Fun Stuff’ and ‘The Broken Estate’. Non-subscribers will only hear extracts from the episodes. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrwaor Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingswaor Books featured in the series: Gustav Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Penguin Classics, trans. Geoffrey Wall) Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground (Vintage Classics, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky) Three stories by Anton Chekhov (UK: Bravo Ltd., from Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky; USA: same edition, Modern Library) Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich (Vintage, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky) Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (UK: Penguin Modern Classics; USA: Mariner Books Classics) Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark (UK: Penguin Modern Classics; USA: Norton) Saul Bellow, Seize The Day (Penguin Modern Classics) Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin (UK: Penguin Modern Classics; USA: Vintage) Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (UK: Penguin Modern Classics; USA: Harper Perennial Modern Classics) Dag Solstad, Shyness & Dignity (Vintage, trans. Sverre Lyngstad) Amit Chaudhuri, Afternoon Raag (UK: Faber and Faber, USA: New York Review Books Classics) Gwendoline Riley, My Phantoms (UK: Granta Books; USA: New York Review Books Classics)

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