Neuromantics discuss Letters from Isohe

Neuromantics is a long-running podcast hosted by the neuroscientist Sophie Scott and the writer and composer Will Eaves. Their conversations range across language, gesture, and other modes of communication in the arts and sciences.

In the current episode of Neuromantics, there is a lively discussion of Liz Hodgkin’s Letters from Isohe. With characteristic wit and sublimity, Will and Sophie locate the book in the long tradition of public letter-writing and witness-bearing.

An extract from their conversation: ‘The book memorably evokes the challenges of life in this beautiful but remote community. Food supplies falter, girls are forced into marriage, teachers’ salaries disappear, people die: but the village schools survive… Hodgkin’s dispatches are responsive and informal; they bring us close, as only letters can, to the moment of witness… that feeling of responsiveness has something to do with handwriting itself…’

Elsewhere, in the summer issue of the Brixton Review, Will Eaves writes about Letters from Isohe. In his review, ‘Send Us To School’, he writes: ‘Letters from Isohe is a frank and often stirring book: the strong element of reportage is intelligently close-quartered, so that small-scale triumphs and disappointments must stand in for the bigger problems of infrastructure in a contested state.’

At other times, he continues, ‘the experience of reading it is unsettling, and immediate in a different, more personal way, as though one found oneself suddenly in receipt of bad news, holding a torn envelope, not knowing what to do.’

(Copies of the Brixton Review are free — if you can find them. But it may be easier to subscribe.)