A time for reflection | 8 March 2018

The precarious stasis of late pregnancy offers the narrator of Jessie Greengrass’s exceptional first novel a space — albeit an uncomfortable one — for reflection. She sifts through her own immediate and past experience: caring for her dying mother in her early twenties; her relationship with her partner Johannes; her childhood; the birth of her first child.

This fragmented narrative is intercut with the stories of Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, the inventor of the X-ray; Sigmund and Anna Freud; and the 18th-century anatomist, surgeon and empiricist John Hunter — along with other brief cameos from the history of science, from the Lumière brothers to the engraver Jan van Rymsdyk. These figures are not quite fictionalised; the narrator is always present, reminding us that this is partly guesswork, that there are experiences she ‘can’t imagine’. And yet, through a kind of sleight of hand, and with the aid of what is evidently meticulous research (as conducted by both narrator and author), these scenes from the past are vividly realised.