The Birth of Love, Joanna Kavenna’s first novel since her prize-winning Inglorious, is clever, ambitious and not wholly successful.
The Birth of Love, Joanna Kavenna’s first novel since her prize-winning Inglorious, is clever, ambitious and not wholly successful. It is a tribute to her skill that she handles her four narrative strands without lapsing into confusion; the reader is deftly directed on a journey through time and place. The danger is that emotional resonance is sacrificed to an over-schematic insistence on concept.
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Her first story is based on historical fact. In 1865, Ignaz Semmelweis is confined to a Viennese lunatic asylum where he is barbarously treated. Semmelweis, a doctor, discovered that the many deaths in hospitals from puerperal fever were caused by doctors with unwashed hands coming straight from post-mortems to examine women in labour.
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