Jenny Diski

Una tarde de principios de 1990 Charlotte Fitzroy sale desnuda al jardín de su casa londinense y se pone a arrancar las plantas. ¿Qué le hace perder así la compostura? En su día activa feminista y partidaria del socialismo, ha asistido perpleja a la caida del muro de Berlin y a la fractura del comunismo. El porvenir parece lleno de negros presagios, y a ello se añade la muerte de su hija en un accidente de trafico. En las semanas siguientes, mientras una parte de Charlotte vive su depresion en la esfera real, otra escapa a un ambito distinto: un peculiar pais de las maravillas poblado de insolitos personajes como Jenny, una orangutana parlanchina con las ideas muy claras; los pesos pesados de la ideologia del siglo XX, Darwin, Marx y Freud, y tambien el capitan FitzRoy, un posible y melancolico ancestro. Audaz, a la vez honda y divertida, El tio del mono propone una visita nada complaciente al interior de la locura: un lugar que en el mundo de hoy queda mas proximo de lo que muchos creian.

Viajar con Jenny Diski resulta una experiencia, cuando emnos, insólita.

Jenny Diski?s attempt to keep still and mentally idle resulted in a year in which she travelled to New Zealand, spent two months almost alone in a cottage in the country and visited the S mi people of Lapland. Diski, fails to keep still and, like the philosopher Montaigne, keeps a record of her ramblings both mental and physical hoping as he did in time to make her mind ashamed of itself. Interspersed with ill-tempered descriptions of these trips are digressions on the subject of her sore foot; her childhood desire for ?a condition?, thoughts about growing older, spiders, fundamentalism and the problems of keeping warm.

Jenny DiskiMarie de Gournay was eighteen when she read, and was overwhelmed by, the essays of the French philosopher Montaigne. She had to be revived with hellebore. When she finally met Montaigne, she stabbed herself with a hairpin until the blood ran in order to show her devotion. He made her his adopted daughter for the two months they knew each other. He died four years later, after which, though scorned by intellectuals, she became his editor. Jenny Diski engages with this passionate and confused relationship between 'father and daughter', old writer/young acolyte, possible lovers, using both their voices. Much of their story is about absence of the people they love. In Jenny Diski's hands it becomes a fascinating tale.

Many books have been written on the Sixties: tributes to music and fashion, sex, drugs and revolution. In The Sixties , Jenny Diski breaks the mould, wryly dismantling the big ideas that dominated the era - liberation, permissiveness and self-invention - to consider what she and her generation were really up to. Was it rude to refuse to have sex with someone? Did they take drugs to get by, or to see the world differently? How responsible were they for the self-interest and greed of the Eighties? With characteristic wit and verve, Diski takes an incisive look at the radical beliefs to which her generation subscribed, little realising they were often old ideas dressed up in new forms, sometimes patterned by BIBA. She considers whether she and her peers were as serious as they thought about changing the world, if the radical Sixties were funded by the baby-boomers' parents, and if the big idea shaping the Sixties was that it really felt as if it meant something to be young.

Una obsesión por los baños, una esperanza de infidelidad o un suicidio en el metro son los puntos de partida de estos relatos de humor negro, llenos de sorpresas y subversiones memorables.

Ninguna otra década del siglo XX puede competir con la de los sesenta en carga simbólica y alcance mítico. Ni los locos años veinte, ni los turbulentos setenta que le siguieron han conseguido derribar a la decada prodigiosa de su pedestal: fueron años de plena ebullicion politica, economica y cultural, y cualquiera que los viviera en primera persona admite que el mundo cambio, desde entonces, para siempre. Jenny Diski estuvo alli, en el epicentro del swinging London. Nacida en 1948, llego a la adolescencia en la plenitud de la decada, y participo del entusiasmo general: consumio drogas, descubrio la revolucion sexual, compro la ropa de moda, salio de noche hasta el amanecer, vibro con la musica, acudio a manifestaciones e incluso pago las consecuencias de todo ello pasando un tiempo en una institucion psiquiatrica. Los sesenta fueron convulsos, apasionantes, y quien no los viviera tendra que conformarse con recuerdos y retratos de la epoca que palidecen ante la verdad. Pero, ¿cual fue la verdad? Al cumplir sesenta años de vida, Jenny Diski decidio confrontar su edad con aquellos sesenta de su juventud para reexaminar asi lo que ha quedado del mito, y lo que se ha ido borrando con el tiempo, para meditar una idea de la decada muy diferente de la que se ha perpetuado con el paso de las generaciones. Mas alla del recuerdo nostalgico, Diski afronta este texto como un ajuste de cuentas con los ideales y los comportamientos de la epoca. Para la autora, mas que un periodo de revolucion hacia un mundo mejor, los sesenta fueron el germen de la sociedad corrupta, individualista y desigual que emergio en los años ochenta: la contracultura fue, en el fondo, un movimiento erratico que reforzo al poder establecido en vez de cuestionarlo. Con la maxima objetividad posible, y con un estilo preciso y esclarecedor, Diski consigue darle la vuelta a los sesenta como si fueran un calcetin, y logra aportar asi una perspectiva tan provocadora como lucida de un tiempo que, a diferencia de lo que nos han contado, no fue tan maravilloso como parece.

'We were on a train, out of the way of our lives, any of us could tell anything we liked. We were, for the time being, just the story we told.'In spite of the fact that her idea of travel is to stay at home with the phone off the hook, Jenny Diski takes a trip around the perimeter of the USA by train.Somewhat reluctantly she meets all kinds of characters, all bursting with stories to tell, and finds herself brooding about the marvellously familiar landscape of America, half-known already through film and television. Like the pulse of the train over the rails, the theme of the dying pleasures of smoking thrums through the book, along with reflections on the condition of solitude and the nature of friendship and memories triggered by her past time in psychiatric hospitals.

En su primera adolescencia, Jenny Diski pasó largas horas en la Circle Line del metro de Londres, recorriendo el perímetro interior de esta ciudad mientras se entregaba a la lectura y a la observación de los demás pasajeros. Años más tarde, optará por una manera parecida de desplazarse al viajar por los Estados Unidos en ferrocarril. Diski refleja sus impresiones partiendo de una premisa muy oco frecuente: éste es un libro donde no ocurrirá nada, el libro de una viajera que se confiesa poco amiga de los viajes y amante, sobre todo, de la tranquilidad...

I was so absorbed by her writing it was unreal . . . I find myself hungry to find the next morsel of who Jenny was and what her life was like EMILIA CLARKE (on Why Didnt You Just Do What You Were Told?)What does Jenny Diski know about animals? Shes really not sure. She remembers the animal books she read in her childhood; the cartoons she watched; the meals she ate; the strays she found; the animals who have lived and still live with her. She examines human beings, too, and the way in which we have looked at, studied, treated and written about the non-human creatures with whom we share the planet. Subtle, intelligent and brilliantly observed, What I Dont Know About Animals is an engaging look at what it means to be human - and what it means to be animal.

Marie de Gournay was eighteen when she read, and was overwhelmed by, the essays of the French philosopher Montaigne. She had to be revived with hellebore. When she finally met Montaigne, she stabbed herself with a hairpin until the blood ran in order to show her devotion. He made her his adopted daughter for the two months they knew each other. He died four years later, after which, though scorned by intellectuals, she became his editor. Jenny Diski engages with this passionate and confused relationship between father and daughter, old writer/young acolyte, possible lovers, using both their voices. Much of their story is about absence of the people they love. In Jenny Diskis hands it becomes a fascinating tale.

Una brillante exploración de lo que significa ser humano y lo que significa ser animal. Un sugerente análisis de nuestra relación con los animales.¿Qué sabe Jenny Diski de los animales? Como no estaba muy segura, empezo a escribir este libro: nuestra relacion y actitud hacia los animales merecen una reflexion. Y enLo que no se de los animalesdemuestra el porque. En su investigacion, Diski recuerda los animales de peluche de su infancia, los que aparecian en los libros infantiles que leia y en los dibujos animados que veia. Nos habla de los animales con los que ha convivido, de los que se ha encontrado y los que ha temido. Tambien reflexiona sobre el ser humano y como este ha observado, estudiado, tratado y escrito sobre sus compañeros de viaje en este planeta. Entrevista a cientificos, analiza a Derrida y a su mascota y observa elefantes en Kenia para encontrar la clave de la compleja relacion que establecemos con ellos.