Mailing List


Rosanna Mclaughlin
Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

Articles Available Online


The Pious and the Pommery

Essay

Issue No. 18

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

Issue No. 18

I.   Where is the champagne? On second thoughts this is not entirely the right question. The champagne is in the ice trough, on...

Essay

April 2019

Ariana and the Lesbian Narcissus

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

April 2019

‘Avoid me not!’ ‘Avoid me not!’                                   Narcissus   Let me describe a GIF I’ve been watching. A lot....

Acts of Infidelity is the second novel by Lena Andersson that follows unlucky-in-love heroine Ester Nilsson, and it’s another scalpel-sharp look at a doomed relationship In Wilful Disregard (2013), Andersson showed – in excruciating detail – the drawn-out decline of a love affair where one person is ambivalent and the other is wholly in love; here, we get an equally unflinching look at Ester’s involvement with a married man It is very much a standalone book, although there are echoes of Wilful Disregard throughout; I was overjoyed to be reunited with the funny, intelligent Ester and curious to see whether she had learnt anything from her previous relationship (with Hugo Rask, an artist who spent the entirety of Wilful Disregard blowing hot and cold), only to recognise quickly that she had not It would be tempting and satisfying in a book to steer the characters away from their past mistakes, to make them do things differently this time – but in real life people don’t necessarily learn, not when it comes to matters of the heart   Ester is an intimidatingly clever person, someone who has dedicated her life to understanding and recording the world around her intensely through writing and theorising And yet, when it comes to men, she has a particular blind spot Her intelligence, in a way, is her undoing; it gives her the capacity to self-deceive endlessly, to analyse even the smallest situations and find them, somehow, hopeful Olof fails to send her a text message on the first New Year’s Eve that they’re a couple, an act which Ester interprets a sign of him being emotionally overwhelmed by his feelings for her, unable to condense them in a mere text With her friends – styled as the anonymous ‘girlfriend chorus’ in Wilful Disregard, but here fleshed out more as individuals each with their own approach to The Problem of Olof (and to love more generally) – Ester is able to analyse and re-analyse in a way that’s both absurd and also painfully familiar to anyone who’s ever been there   As the observers of this unromantic romance, we

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

Ten Years at Garage Moscow

Art Review

November 2018

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art Review

November 2018

When I arrive in Moscow, I am picked up from the airport by Roman, a patriotic taxi driver sent to collect me courtesy of...
Becoming Alice Neel

Art

August 2017

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art

August 2017

From the first time I saw Alice Neel’s portraits, I wanted to see the world as she did. Neel was the Matisse of the...

READ NEXT

feature

May 2016

Postcard from Istanbul

Sydney Ribot

feature

May 2016

    Saturday       On March 19, at 1 p.m. in a café off Turnacibaşı St., an...

Art

August 2013

The External World

David OReilly

Art

August 2013

  The External World from David OReilly.   BASIC ANIMATION AESTHETICS   For the purposes of talking about animation,...

feature

Issue No. 7

On a Decline in British Fiction

Jennifer Hodgson

Patricia Waugh

feature

Issue No. 7

‘The special fate of the novel,’ Frank Kermode has written, ‘is always to be dying.’ In Britain, the terminal...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required