In his Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, Ludwig Wittgenstein alludes to an incident that followed the death of Franz Schubert. He recalls that Schubert’s brother cut several scores into small pieces, each consisting of only a few bars of music, and handed them out to Schubert’s favourite pupils. This, Wittgenstein argues, was a totally understandable act of grief. He goes on to suggest, however, that if, in his grief, Schubert’s brother had left the scores untouched, or even burned them, then that too would be equally legible to us. Such is the disorienting nature of loss – in its wake, anything goes.
In The Strangers, Women’s prize-winning author Naomi Alderman tests this thesis to its limits. How about dealing with grief by writing an uneasy memoir/speculative fiction hybrid about the sudden appearance of a new species of quasi-badgers that seem to improve the quality of local soil?
