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Cure by Katherine Brabon review – moments of grace in meditation on chronic illness

Cure by Katherine Brabon review – moments of grace in meditation on chronic illness

The Guardian18-07-2025
Katherine Brabon's fourth novel follows a mother and daughter with a shared experience of chronic illness who travel to Italy in search of a cure. It feels like a companion piece to her elegant previous novel Body Friend, about three women who seek out different ways of managing their chronic pain after surgery. Cure continues Brabon's metaphoric use of doubles, mirrors and reflections to explore the social dimensions of the body in pain. It opens in Lake Como, where, we are told, in autumn 'clouds devour the hills around the lake' and the water 'reflects the scene of disappearance. [It] cannot help but replicate the obscuring fog.' Vera has been here before; she is now taking her 16-year-old daughter, Thea, to a small town in Lombardy, where she herself travelled with her parents as a sick teen, to seek out an obscure man who promises to heal and cure people of their illnesses.
Cure captures the painful intimacies between a mother and daughter: 'Vera has lived this, or a version of this, but she wants it to be different for her daughter,' Brabon writes. Vera and Thea are allied in their shared experience of chronic headaches, fatigue and joints stiffened with pain. Both have been subjected to the banal health advice of others – to take cold showers, hot baths, avoid coffee and consume tea. At the same time the pair are estranged – Thea wants to rebel against Vera's anxious and protective proscriptions; Vera favours curatives such as 'supplement powders, tablets, and tea' over the prescribed medications recommended by her doctor husband.
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The gentle and unassuming narrative shifts between Vera's adolescent pilgrimage to Italy and her daughter's, and between sequences from Vera's early adulthood and scenes of the mother and child at home in Melbourne. Vera is taken to a thermal bath in regional Victoria by her parents, and spends hours connecting with other young women online. In Italy, Thea rests and walks to the lake, meeting a teenage boy called Santo. Writing in her journal, she reflects upon how her mother's journey maps neatly on to her own: the same age, the same bed, a shared illness, a shared purpose. To Vera, her daughter is a 'just a body': 'a mirror of her own body … she cannot see beyond the body, its destruction, its inheritance'.
Thea and Vera's nights are long, edged with pain; the days are repetitious, spent managing that burden. Brabon is sensitive to how time can dissolve in these efforts of maintenance, bracketing the hours with temporary relief. Vera partakes in a fortnightly regime of subcutaneous injections, while Thea relies on painkillers to alleviate the 'fatigue and fever and aching eyelids'. As she swallows the tablets, she 'feels her mother come back to her'. In this cyclical experience of illness, Thea looks to Vera as a template of what will come.
In Thea, Brabon draws a sensitive portrait of a girl adjusting to life in a body that will be constrained. Vera is a complex figure, anxious and tired, whose responsibility for her daughter both draws them together and drives them apart. They turn to writing as a means of communication and escape: Thea retreats into her journal, diarising her own adolescence and crafting stories about her mother; Vera appeals to online communities, where she can share her own experience anonymously. This secret retreat into fantasy is driven by necessity, for it is there that mother and daughter are free to imagine their lives with a supple and mysterious hope.
Vera and Thea must live slowly, carefully, and the narrative reproduces this in its structure – to enervating effect. Between sequences of Vera and Thea in the past and present are italicised passages told from an estranged, omniscient perspective. The pair become 'mother and daughter', 'the woman' and 'the girl'. Thea's upset sleep and swollen knees, initially presented to the reader with first-hand intimacy, are reconsidered with toneless neutrality, a flat recital of events: 'The girl feels both happy and angry'; 'the girl walks to the lake'. In adopting this kind of glacial formalism, Brabon perhaps seeks to capture the effects of bodily estrangement with the sage reticence of a writer like Rachel Cusk, whose novel Parade is quoted in the epigraph. Instead, these italicised passages achieve something more dry, too narrow. The warmer haze of Brabon's other prose better captures the feelings of rupture and dissociation brought about by the sick body and by the family in conflict.
Brabon's play with narration in Cure signals her subtle exploration of how stories of sickness can be confining, too definitive. Shifting our attention to the ill body beyond pathology, she re-engages with the relational and affective qualities of this experience, sketching a dim world, foggy with illusion and mythmaking. Narrative intensity is stripped back for something softer, more reflective. If the novel's carefully refined atmosphere is sometimes remote to a fault, it also contains arresting moments of grace, as Brabon meditates on the stories we tell about our bodies, wellness, healing and memory.
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Cure by Katherine Brabon is out through Ultimo Press ($34.99)
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Russian tourists flock back to Europe
Russian tourists flock back to Europe

Telegraph

time3 hours ago

  • Telegraph

Russian tourists flock back to Europe

Russian tourists are returning to Europe in growing numbers, despite the war in Ukraine, with France, Italy and Spain their favoured holiday destinations. The three travel hotspots are all Nato and EU members and have imposed sanctions on Moscow. Hotel stays by Russians in Italy and France surged by more than 19 per cent in the past year, which Ukrainian diplomats branded 'disturbing' and a security risk. But France, which spearheads the 'coalition of the willing' nations supporting Ukraine with Britain, defends keeping borders open to rich Russian tourists, as does Italy. The trend was revealed by Telegraph analysis of data on hotel room stays and rentals on websites such as and Airbnb, and of visas issued to the EU's Schengen free-movement zone. Vsevolod Chentsov, Ukraine's ambassador to the EU, warned that ignoring the returning Russians would be 'short-sighted' and dangerous. He told the Telegraph: 'In the fourth year of Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine, it is extremely surprising to see statistics showing an increase in the number of visas issued to Russian citizens and a growth in tourist traffic from Russia to EU countries. 'We know that Russian society overwhelmingly supports the war. Moreover, it prefers to think that Russia is at war with the West and not with Ukraine, where the Russian army commits war crimes on massive scale.' He added: 'With increasing number of Russia's cyberattacks against EU member states, acts of sabotage and all sort of hybrid activities aimed at undermining European democracies, it is disturbing that Russian citizens can easily enjoy the benefits of travelling to Europe. 'Continuing to ignore this reality is short-sighted. It's a matter of European security.' Fires in warehouses known to be part of logistical supply chains have taken place across Europe, including in Britain, while there have also been reports of sabotaged train tracks. In the past, Russian spies posing as diplomats would be linked to these incidents, but since the 2018 poisoning of the Skripals, Moscow is known to also deploy agents on tourist visas. Stop EU visas for Russians Sir William Browder is an American-born English financier turned anti-Putin activist and campaigner. He urged France, Italy and Spain to stop issuing visas to Russians. 'Unless the Russians can demonstrate in a visa interview that they're opposed to the Putin regime, they shouldn't be allowed to come to Europe,' he said. European capitals have hit the Kremlin with waves of sanctions since Putin launched his illegal invasion in 2022. Both Britain and the EU closed their airspace to Russian airlines, triggering a drop in tourist numbers. There are still dozens of routes to Europe through Turkey, Georgia, Serbia and other countries. In order to get to Rome, for example, a Russian tourist would have to stop over in Turkey or the UAE and switch flights. The additional costs put the trip out of the reach of most ordinary Russians, but those that do make it to Europe also face difficulties because of the sanctions, which means their bank cards don't work. However, Istanbul's Ataturk airport is brimming with currency exchanges where Russians can swap roubles for euros to sustain their visits to Europe. 'There are many Russians who support the war, and particularly the Russians who have money,' Sir William said. 'What we absolutely don't want to do is allow these Russians to enjoy the privileges and resources of Europe, while at the same time they're supporting Putin's war efforts.' 'Europe should be open for people in the Russian opposition who are being persecuted, but no visa should be issued to Russian oligarchs or mini-garchs and others who support Putin, and I think we should err on the side of non visa issuance in that respect.' He said refusing visas would put pressure on Putin's regime and lessen the security risk posed by Russia's hybrid war against the West. Sanctions undermined Sir William said EU governments had to be consistent because if one country grants a Schengen visa, the supposed tourist can travel anywhere in the passport-free zone. Western governments have been reluctant to issue outright travel bans, except in the case of sanctioned individuals such as Putin's cronies and apparatchiks. In contrast, the Baltic nations and pro-Ukraine countries bordering Ukraine and Russia stopped issuing tourist visas to Russia or heavily restricted their numbers. Jan Lipavsky, foreign minister of the Czech Republic, accused those welcoming Russian holidaymakers of undermining the EU's sanctions against Moscow in return for wealthy tourists' cash. He told The Telegraph, 'It is deeply troubling to see some EU countries returning to business as usual with Russian tourists while Ukraine continues to suffer under brutal aggression. 'Czechia has taken a principled stance – we do not process any tourist visa applications and we believe this should be the standard across the European Union.' Mr Lipavsky said the numbers of tourists coming to the EU last year was 'totally excessive' and raised serious concerns 'not only from a security standpoint, but also from a moral one'. He said, 'At such volumes, we cannot rule out the possibility that individuals complicit in war crimes are among those vacationing in our resorts. That is unacceptable.' He added, 'I also see that some countries have a self-interested motive – they want the income from Russian tourism. It's not just about visa fees; it's about money spent on hotels, shopping, tickets and so on. Russians are known to spend a lot. 'This undermines the credibility of our sanctions regime and sends a confusing message about our values.' Lifeline for dissidents Andrei Soldatov is a senior fellow with the Center for European Policy Analysis think tank and a Russian investigative journalist specialising in the activities of the Kremlin's secret services. He said the visas were valuable for dissidents and families that wanted to visit them abroad. He said, 'it is a problem which doesn't have a simple solution. These are also the countries which help people with anti-Kremlin views move out. 'To make it safe for these people one needs to hide their applications in a stream of other applications. One cannot really expect a Russian dissident to come to a foreign embassy for a 'dissident visa', given the high level of repression in the country.' Popular locations Across the EU, visitor numbers are just a tenth of what they were in 2019, before the pandemic and the invasion, but this varies substantially across the bloc. In 2024, just six EU countries saw an increase in guest nights booked by Russians via websites such as Airbnb, according to figures from Eurostat. Italy saw the largest increase of 18.9 per cent, with 321,678 guest nights across the year, the highest in Europe. France remains the third most popular location for Russian tourists with 203,072 guest nights per year, which is an increase of 7.8 per cent - the fourth highest spike in Europe. Spain is second at 259,068 guest nights, down 3.6 per cent from the previous year, according to the figures obtained from the EU's statistics agency. There was a rise of 13 per cent in the number of nights booked by Russians in Hungary, which has a government that is notoriously soft on Putin. The UK, whose data differs slightly from the EU's, would rank seventh on the list for Russia visitors after Italy, Spain, France, Portugal, Greece and Cyprus. Unlike France and Italy, Britain saw its visitor numbers fall by around 1.3 per cent year-on-year, according to data from the Office for National Statistics. Other statistics, which look at nights across hotels rather than Airbnb-style websites, suggest that France is hosting 27 per cent of the level it was in 2019, compared to just 9.8 per cent in the United Kingdom. The UK has always required Russian tourists to apply for visas, including when it was part of the EU. It never joined Schengen. Schengen members also require that Russians obtain visas. There was an agreement, which made it faster and cheaper to obtain those tourist visas to enter the EU but it was suspended after Putin invaded Ukraine. Analysis of Schengen area visas also showed that Italy and France were leading the tourism rapprochement with Russia. Italy issued 152,254 Schengen area visas at its two Russian consulates last year, which was almost 19,000 more than in 2023. France issued a total of 123, 890, according to European Commission figures, 25,000 more than the year before. Spain issued 111,527, an increase of 15,000. Figures first reported by the EU Observer website showed a rebound in Schengen visas for Russians with 552,630 issued in total last year, an increase of nine per cent. Greece issued 59,703 visas and Hungary 23,382. Rome and Paris unrepentant 'Italy continues to regularly issue visas to Russian tourists who meet our requirements,' A spokesman for Antonio Tajani, the Italian minister of foreign affairs and deputy prime minister, said. 'Our opposition is to the Russian army's military operations in Ukraine, not to the Russian people.' The Elysée was presented with the statistics but did not respond to requests for comment. France has previously defended issuing visas to Russians. 'People-to-people relations and cultural ties can play a positive role in fostering mutual understanding and dialogue between populations,' the French foreign affairs ministry told EU Observer. 'We work hard at maintaining a differentiation between the regime responsible for the war and the population, its civil society, and the opposition,' it said. 'It is essential to maintain this window, to enable Russian society to get access to a plurality of reliable sources of information.' The British and Spanish government were asked for comment. The European Commission said they could not comment, despite being given 72 hours notice, because it was summer. Eurostat, the EU's statistics body, has collected data on the number of guest nights spent in 'collaborative economy platforms', which includes sites such as Airbnb and Expedia since 2018. The UK's Office for National Statistics has collected similar data since mid-2023, meaning pre-invasion figures are not available and there might be minor methodological differences between the two bodies. Data on broader hotel stays across Europe have not been updated for the entirety of Europe in 2024.

I lost seven stone WITHOUT Mounjaro – here's three very simple things I've done that have helped me slim down & tone up
I lost seven stone WITHOUT Mounjaro – here's three very simple things I've done that have helped me slim down & tone up

The Sun

time9 hours ago

  • The Sun

I lost seven stone WITHOUT Mounjaro – here's three very simple things I've done that have helped me slim down & tone up

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The Mediterranean island that Brits don't know about with spectacular beaches and it's loved by Italians
The Mediterranean island that Brits don't know about with spectacular beaches and it's loved by Italians

The Sun

time9 hours ago

  • The Sun

The Mediterranean island that Brits don't know about with spectacular beaches and it's loved by Italians

MANY holidaymakers will jet off to Italy over the summer - but few know an underrated island so special even locals gush about it. Places like Sicily will always be popular with British holidaymakers, though if you speak to Italians its the Aegadian Islands they will be heading for. 5 5 In total there are five Aegadian Islands, but only three are inhabited - Favignana, Levanzo and Marettimo. Favignana is the largest of three main islands and from above is shaped like a butterfly. It's known for its blue and white fishing harbour and narrow streets. It's small, too, so there's no need to hire a car - you can cycle or walk around to see the towns or go to the beach. Another option is to take one of the many boat day trips to take a tour of the island. You'll see loads of coves and even go to the neighbouring island of Levanzo. Some of the most popular beaches on the island are Cala Rossa, Cala Azzurra, Bue Marino and Lido Burrone. One visitor said about Lido Burrone: "The crystal-clear water and white sand make it one of Favignana's most interesting beaches. It feels like being in the Caribbean." white sand. The beach is a recommended place for seeing marine life, as it's full of fish and a popular snorkelling spot. For any history buffs, Favignana was once the tuna capital of the world because of its tuna fisheries. 'Otherworldly' Italian island just three hours from the UK that featured in two huge Hollywood franchises 5 5 In the 15th century, the island was ruled by Giovanni de Karissima who was also known as the 'Baron of Tuna". When it comes to where to eat on the island, you're most definitely spoilt for choice. There's plenty of seafood dishes thanks to its island location, as well as pasta, arancini and panelle. You don't have to eat at a restaurant either, there are plenty of markets and little takeaway shacks if you fancy something more causal. There are bars dotted around the island so whether you seek shade in the towns or full sun on the beach, you can always find somewhere to have a refreshing drink. When it comes to venturing there, Favignana is 10 miles from Sicily and is easily accessible by ferry. You can travel from Trapani to Favignana all year round and in the high season there are 25 crossings a day. The trip can take up to 1 hour and 10 minutes, with tickets starting at €10 (£8.68). Or you can hop from Marsala to Favignana which has five daily crossings and is generally quicker taking 30 minutes per trip. The ticket prices start at €13 (£11.29). Here's another Italian island that's loved by celebs and the royal family - it has hidden beaches and holiday villages. And you can visit this largely untouched Italian island with red sand beaches. 5

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