This is made even more apparent in later sections that look at Freud’s studies in psychoanalysis. Jessie Greengrass: ‘a lifetime’s inculcated faith in the explanatory power of books’ It is a neat line that highlights a central theme of Sight: how reflection and analysis can either enlighten or stultify. In the same era, the German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen is inventing the X-ray machine, whose black and white imagery his wife Bertha thinks akin to looking at her own death. We visit 19th-century Paris as the Lumière brothers show their cinema films for the first time. Sight gives an authoritative account of one woman's decision to become a mother, while simultaneously weaving in biographical stories of famous visionaries down through the centuries. The precise prose and commanding tone of her collection, which won the Edge Hill Short Story Prize and a Somerset Maugham Award, are also to be found in her new book.
"She told me that without reflection, without the capacity to trace our lives backwards and pick the patterns out, we become liable to act as animals do." Jessie Greengrass has followed up her acclaimed short story collection An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It with a most unusual debut novel that explores the art of contemplation.
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