Category: Pippa Goldschmidt

Pippa Goldschmidt is an author living in Edinburgh and Berlin who likes writing about science. Her most recent books are a family history/memoir Deutschstunden (CulturBooks) and a short story collection about women in science Schrödinger’s Wife (and other possibilities) (Goldsmiths Press/Gold SF). Her work has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 as well as appearing in Best American Science and Nature Writing, Best British Short Stories, ArtReview, BBC Sky At Night magazine, the Times Literary Supplement, Gutter and Magma.

Introduction

Many moons ago I used to be an astronomer, and spent much of my professional life classifying images of galaxies. Was a particular galaxy a Seyfert 1 or a Seyfert 2? Was it radio loud, or radio quiet? But nothing was ever easily identifiable; every category had its exceptions that blurred boundaries. In time I realised that the intended aim of classifying actually created the blurring. All this is a (very) roundabout way of justifying my choices here. Several undeniably echt short stories, yes, but also a prose poem and some essays, as well as hybrids and autofiction.

The literary marketplace is keen to sell us the next big thing. There’s an emphasis on the new, the latest, the just-discovered, the debuts. But for me reading is rereading, just as the most important part of writing is rewriting, and a story often comes alive during the nth rereading, when I feel I both know and don’t know it. And as with literature, scientific discoveries and breakthroughs get all the headlines, but they only becomes ‘real’ if they can be repeated.

So, in random order:

‘Iron’ by Primo Levi, translated by Raymond Rosenthal

This is a stand-alone chapter in Levi’s autobiographical mosaic of fact and fiction as told through the chemical elements he has worked with. ‘Iron’ describes his attempt to identify an unknown chemical substance when he was a student in Fascist Italy, and moves from there to a poignant study of a fellow student who became a resistance fighter, and whose ‘iron’ moral strength inspired Levi. The Periodic Table was chosen by the Royal Institution in 2006 as ‘the best science book ever’.

First published in The Periodic Table, Schocken Books, 1984

‘Pause’ by Mary Ruefle

I could have made up this entire list with selections of Mary Ruefle’s work. This piece on her experience of the menopause starts with an image of a ‘cryalog’, recording just how often she cried during one month. “Anyone who has periods is a girl. You know this is true and it is very funny to you”. Yes, so funny and so, so true…

First published online in Granta, and included in My Private Property, Wave Books, 2016

‘On Being The Right Size’ by J. B. S. Haldane

What biophysical laws determine the most effective size for a given species?

“The most obvious differences between different animals are differences of size, but for some reason the zoologists have paid singularly little attention to them. In a large textbook of zoology before me I find no indication that the eagle is larger than the sparrow, or the hippopotamus bigger than the hare, though some grudging admissions are made in the case of the mouse and the whale.”

Haldane was a pioneering geneticist who thought nothing of experimenting on himself and who wrote prolifically, not only about science but also about society (he was a committed Marxist and contributed regular columns to the Daily Workernewspaper). Come to his writing for the science and stay for the crisp, clear writing reminiscent of George Orwell (and not only because of the leftwing politics) and the humour.

First published in Possible Worlds and Other Essays, Chatto and Windus, 1927 and available online at Faded Page

‘The Tribute’ by Jane Gardam

I’ve adored Jane Gardam’s writing, ever since I read her novel A Long Way from Verona when I was the same age as the just-teenaged protagonist. (When I fan-girled her at Edinburgh Book Festival several years ago she admitted this novel was autobiographical and I fell in love with her.) ‘The Tribute’ is pure comedy-tragedy, a lunch with three genteel upper-class English women who think they are honouring the memory of their former nanny Dench. These remnants of the Empire are, of course, monsters. But they get their come-uppance…

First published in The Sidmouth Letters, Abacus, 1980, and also dramatised for TV in the Tales of the Unexpected in 1983

‘The Means of Escape’ by Penelope Fitzgerald

This was Fitzgerald’s only short story collection, perhaps she’s better known as a novelist and biographer. But what a collection! This story is set in 19th century Van Diemen’s Land (present day Tasmania); Alice Godley is a young woman living with her family near a penal colony who encounters an escaped convict. Fitzgerald’s genius at evoking specific times and places is fully in evidence here, and it has a perfectly earned twist at the end.

First published in The Means of Escape, Flamingo, 2000

‘Errand’ by Raymond Carver

The last story in his last collection, and very much concerned with death. This story, based on the death of Chekhov and its immediate aftermath, segues seamlessly from fact to fiction; you just cannot see the join. I’m endlessly intrigued by the way that something made-up can shed light on the real world.

First published in 1987 in The New Yorker, and available to subscribers to read here; included in Where I’m Calling From, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1988

The Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi in The Mabinogion, translated by Sioned Davies

Another story of metamorphosis, of shape-shifting. A woman who is made from flowers to please a man, and who is subsequently unfaithful to him. Of course she has to be punished for her transgression, and is transformed from flowers to an owl. This was the inspiration for Alan Garner’s The Owl Service, but the original 12th Century Welsh tale fascinates in the way the characters’ motivations are both accessible to us and utterly strange in its account of magic, and compression of time and place.

Oxford University Press, 2007

‘Shedding Life’ by Miroslav Holub, translated by David Young

Holub was an immunologist as well as a poet and essayist. This account of how he has to deal with the messy consequences of his neighbour shooting a muskrat is both lyrical and laconic, fusing an empathy for the dying animal with a wonderment at just how complex the passage from life to death can be:

“The blood wasn’t just that unpleasant stuff that under proper and normal conditions belonged inside the muskrat. It was the muskrat’s secret life forced out. This puddle of red sea was, in fact, a vestige of an ancient Silurian sea… In any case, the muskrat was cast ashore from its own little red sea. Billions of red blood cells were coagulating and disintegrating, their hemoglobin molecules puzzled as to how and where to pass their four molecules of oxygen.”

First published in Science, 1986, and included in Shedding Life: Disease, Politics and Other Human Conditions, Milkweed Editions, 1997

‘The Heart of Denis Noble’ by Alison MacLeod

Denis Noble developed the first mathematical model of the heart in 1960, and MacLeod’s masterpiece weaves together a dramatised account of his early work with his own heart surgery in old age, and the dreaded ‘info-dump’ about the relevant science is skilfully avoided. The story was originally published in Litmus, an anthology of specially commissioned stories all featuring scientific discoveries (Comma Press have published several such anthologies), and here it’s paired with an essay by Noble himself. Macleod’s interest in D. H. Lawrence is apparent too, the 1960 trial of the UK publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover plays a role in this story, foreshadowing her 2021 novel Tenderness.

First published in Litmus, Comma Press, 2011 and shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award 2011

‘1 = 1’ by Anne Carson

“Every water has a right place to be, but that place is in motion. You have to keep finding it, keep having it find you. Your movement sinks into and out of it with each stroke. You can fail it with each stroke. What does that mean, fail it.”

The narrator muses on her relationship with water and swimming, and her relationship with a man who draws chalk foxes on the pavement. In this piece the foxes, unlike people, do not fail.

First published online in The New Yorker, and available to subscribers to read here; collected in Wrong Norma, Jonathan Cape, 2024

‘We Would Have Told Each Other Everything’ by Judith Hermann, translated by Katy Derbyshire

Hermann encounters her former psychoanalyst in her home city of Berlin, and decides to follow him into a bar. This action triggers a spooling out of thoughts and memories about friends, their families, their pasts.

Hermann is celebrated in Germany, but not as well known in Anglophone literature compared to her contemporaries Jenny Erpenbeck and Julie Zeh, all of whom are included in the so-called Fräuleinwunder (“girl wonder”) group of women writers. The feminist slogan “The personal is political” is also true of relationships in Germany, so often affected by the collective trauma of the past. Even today the silence surrounding that trauma can be hard to break, but Hermann shows us how writing can be brought to bear on it.

First published in Granta: Deutschland, 2023 and online here