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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/06/love-and-other-thought-experiments-sophie-ward-review This ingenious debut novel is a philosophical investigation into love, loss and the nature of reality Are you conversant with Aeschylus’s gadfly? Wittgenstein’s beetle? Kafka’s “monstrous insect”? We can add to the list Sophie Ward’s ant. This creature, one of Ward’s characters believes, has separated itself from its colony to bore through her eye and penetrate her brain. This is, on the face of it, impossible, and the episode inaugurates the novel’s debate concerning reality and our capacity to know it. An epigraph quotes Catherine Earnshaw’s famous speech in Wuthering Heights describing dreams that “have gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind”. In Love and Other Thought Experiments, Ward proposes to alter the colour of her readers’ minds. Rachel and Eliza are married soulmates considering parenthood. For Rachel, the ant experience is real. It hurts. But it hurts more when her beloved wife, a scientist, cannot believe her. Perhaps the whole thing was a bad dream, Eliza tentatively suggests. But Rachel is adamant: “I know the difference between sleeping and waking. I felt the ant go into my eye ... If you love me, you will trust me.” The ant and its ontological status begin to loom over their entire life together, initiating a dialectic only love can hope to resolve. The ant is, as Eliza thinks, a “small thing and a big thing in one word”. How can one credit anything so illogical? With its advent, somehow the decision is made for Rachel to become pregnant. Simultaneously a tumour swells in her brain. She incubates life and death, a paradox that spreads throughout the labyrinthine complexities of the narrative to come. Continue reading...
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