Bring on the ennui


Boredom: a lively history Peter Toohey


YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 224PP, £18.99 ■Tablet bookshop price £17.10 Tel 01420 592974


Toohey is a professor of classics who has “long been bemused by boredom”. He does not look particularly boring though he is not bearded, his jaw is square, and he looks unacademic and Australian, as indeed he is. He writes breezily and entertainingly about one of the world’s most boring subjects: boredom itself. The book is shortish, and there are a great many pictures, mainly of people in various stages of boredom. But there is also evidence of extensive reading. He provides a series of notes citing such seminal authorities as Antonio Damasio, who wrote among many other things The Feeling of What Happens, and Lars Svendsen, author of A Philosophy of Boredom; only a professor could compose sentences such as “Dr Wemesfelder draws on the justly famous paper, ‘The Psychology of Boredom’ by Otto Fenichel”, or know that Jane Austen never uses the word at all in her novel Emma, preferring “ennui” instead. Do they mean the same? I think we should be told but I’m not sure the professor grasps this particular linguistic nettle. The problem is that a large part of me


Y


regards a sprightly book on boredom as essentially an oxymoron and the idea of anyone, no matter how learned, devoting a large part of his life to its study as, well, a


OUR REVIEWERS John Barnes is the biographer of Stanley Baldwin. Tim Healdis a writer and journalist. Desmond Sewardis a freelance writer and the author of The Burning of the Vanities: Savonarola and the Borgia Pope. Sarah Hayes is an award-winning children’s writer, currently working on her first adult novel. Anthony Gardner is editor of RSL –The Royal Society of Literature Review. His novel The Rivers of Heaven is published by Starhaven.


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22 | THE TABLET | 2 July 2011


ou can tell a lot from an author’s picture and blurb. The blurb tells us that Peter


A woman selling souvenirs outside Red Square, Moscow, 2008


waste of time. On page 45 the author attempts a definition, abandons it and redefines the definition to include dopamine. The second, more satisfactory, effort runs: “Boredom is a social emotion of mild disgust produced by a temporarily unavoidable and predictable circumstance.” This includes the adjective “mild” which is, I suggest, crucial. Boredom is essentially a mild state of mind. It is a passive state, not an active one. Most of us are bored much of the time but this does not matter a lot. Indeed, the author cites the current governor of the Bank of England as saying that boredom is rather a good thing and we should have more of it. Speaking as one


Unconvincing unity


The Pursuit of Italy : a history of a land, its regions and their peoples David Gilmour


ALLEN LANE, 480PP, £25 ■Tablet bookshop price £22.50 Tel 01420 592974


supported the Italian Risorgimento, seeing it in the same light as our Glorious Revolution. Yet few Italians wanted unity. The south went on fighting for the exiled Francis II of Naples until 1865 in a civil war dismissed as brigantaggio by the Piedmontese invaders, who may have killed as many as 60,000 of their opponents. This year, the 150th anniversary of the


I


Risorgimento is celebrated with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm in its homeland. The theme of David Gilmour’s book is that the Italians have failed to create a proper nation state and that the unification of 1859-61, which merged several small countries into a single kingdom, was “a sin against history and geography”. He points out that, far from being a rebirth, the Risorgimento was the conquest of the entire peninsula by the kingdom of Piedmont, made possible only when Habsburg Austria was defeated by France, and it paved the way for Mussolini. He disagrees with historians who claim that unity was wholly desirable, southern


n the nineteenth century, England, the world’s great liberal power, warmly


who had regarded the word as pejorative, and himself as prone to it, this is a comforting verdict. Whether it is a proper subject for academic discussion is another matter. I am a believer in the academic value of the specific. Thus a subject like the moths of the Somerset levels from August to September 1842 is academically respectable, whereas an umbrella word is not. Should serious academics bother with such generalisations, especially when they are outside their subject? I tend not to have a lot of sympathy with the classics professor who seems to be straying into areas well beyond his area of expertise, areas better dealt with by natural generalists, such as journalists. I’d suggest that Toohey is worth attention when pontificating on the classics, but less so when banging on about things like boredom. And there is another inconsistency: I am fascinated by the recipes for old age advanced by Toohey’s late Auntie Madge but unconvinced that they (or she) belong in the pages of academic literature. This is in no sense to decry Madge’s credentials but if her nephew really believed in her, why is she not included somewhere in the index, around the entry for René Magritte? Tim Heald


Italians being unfit to rule themselves. “It was the peninsula’s misfortune that in the nineteenth century a victorious national movement tried to make its inhabitants less Italian and more like other peoples, to turn them into conquerors and colonialists,” he writes. “For eight decades Italy’s leaders followed the same policy, leading their new and fragile nation on a mistaken journey to poverty, colonial disaster, the fascist experiment and the humiliation of the Second World War.” For Gilmour, the real Italy is regional Italy, and he laments the passing of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany and the Venetian Republic, two of the most civilised states in European history.


Since 1945, regionalism of a sort has


returned. When an attempt was made to commemorate Rome’s “liberation” of 1870, the municipality preferred to honour soldiers of the papal army who had died in the city’s defence. Each autumn, the Duke of Parma returns to be feted in his great-grandfather’s duchy, and in Naples affection lingers for the Bourbons, whose survival might have saved the south from becoming the problema del Mezzogiorno. It is ironic that an author with such


impeccably liberal views should debunk one of the nineteenth century’s great liberal myths, and show that, pre-1861, Italy’s monarchies had their good points. But David Gilmour’s objectivity makes him thoroughly convincing. This is a fascinating and important book. Desmond Seward


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