Lord Jim at Home

Born into privilege somewhere in Cornwall in the 1920s, Giles Trenchard receives a bizarre yet commonplace induction into the upper middle class life of the time. His sense of worth is depleted before he leaves the nursery, by the interlocking efforts of a drunken, bleakly dismissive and mostly absent father and a nanny determined to control his bodily processes. He is expected to struggle towards personal agency but always punished for demonstrating it. He is separated from the mother he adores. He’s forced to eat food he can’t stomach. Nevertheless, he visualises himself as “the Prince”. It’s an emotional miseducation that can be completed only by a public school – in this case Rugby, where, already fragile and floundering, he learns to survive through mediocrity, dissociation and doing as little as possible; while beneath the vague, compliant surface that so irritates his teachers, all the suppressed needs, greeds and ambitions of early childhood still writhe. Inevitably, this contradiction will shape his adult life, which Brooke unrolls across the body of her novel, exactly like one of the fouled nappies the nanny draped across Giles’s face at six months old to teach him right from wrong in the context of bowel movements. John Harrison, The Guardian

ritorna nelle librerie un inquietante libro di culto degli anni '70, Lord Jim at Home, di Dinah Brooke (Daunt Books), da noi mai tradotto, mi pare.