More from Books

Tuesday

Kate Teltscher

Seeing the wood for the trees

For a fortnight, four women have been combing through a 30-metre forest plot with infinite care. They have noted the age and height of every tree, measured every fallen branch and twig, identified every plant and assessed the depth and composition of the forest floor. The purpose of this backbreaking work is to understand the critical role played by old-growth forest in carbon storage. Unusually for a field experiment, the team includes a mother and her two daughters. Teenagers are not generally known for their willingness to spend weeks in the undergrowth, but then Suzanne Simard is not your average mother. She is the pioneering Canadian ecologist who has changed the way we think about forests.  Suddenly, lightning flashes overhead.

Susie Mesure

No Hungarian rhapsody: Lázár, by Nelio Biedermann, reviewed

Few first novels, let alone literary debuts in translation from German, arrive with quite so many plaudits – or better covers for those who like horses – as the 23-year-old Nelio Biedermann’s Lázár, which sold more than 200,000 copies on its release in Germany and Switzerland last year. ‘A truly great writer steps onto the stage,’ trumpets Daniel Kehlmann, who is no stranger to great writing: his latest novel, The Director, is on the International Booker Prize longlist. To Patti Smith, Biedermann is ‘gifted’. He is also a scion of the eponymous Lázárs, an aristocratic Hungarian family, making this first foray into fiction a personal project.

Tuesday

Michela Wrong

Will colonialism’s psychological legacy ever cease to be a source of pain?

Whenever the legacy of colonialism comes up for debate, a Monty Python sketch springs to mind. It’s the one from Life of Brian in which Reg, the leader of the People’s Front of Judea, exclaims: ‘What did the Romans ever do for us?’ Corrected, he eventually concedes: ‘OK, apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?’ It’s a brilliant exchange. But as Simukai Chigudu’s beautifully written memoir testifies, one that misses an essential point, in that colonialism’s bequest extends beyond infrastructure and administrative systems. Its most abiding – if tantalising – legacy has been psychological and emotional.

Lee Langley

A sinister strangeness: City Like Water, by Dorothy Tse, reviewed

In Dorothy Tse’s City Like Water the location is never named. Anonymous, mutable, it slips from normal into nightmare, strangeness signalled from the opening lines: ‘In the place I used to live, my rusty top bunk rocked like a boat. Night after night, it carried me off towards a secret crevice.’ This is a novel written out of sorrow and anger: the pain of recalling sweeter times. It’s not the boy narrator who is unreliable; it’s the city itself. When, in Invisible Cities, Italo Calvinodescribed Marco Polo’s travels, he named 55 settings – each delineating an aspect of Venice. Tse has acknowledged Calvino as a major influence, and the locus of City Like Water, in all its bewildering manifestations, its beauty and squalor, can only be her own city – Hong Kong.

Andrew Irwin

Is it better to be reasonable or rational?

You find yourself in the heat of an argument and your mulish interlocutor refuses to see the light. ‘Please,’ you implore, ‘be reasonable.’ But what exactly are you asking? Do you want him to be more rational? Or to act as a typical person might act in his shoes? Maybe the whole question is hopelessly subjective, as your paragon of reasonableness may be his idea of madness, and vice versa. Or else perhaps your request is a mere smokescreen – a sly piece of rhetoric to mask your will to power behind the language of decency? In a short and deftly argued book, Krista Lawlor, a professor of philosophy at Stanford University, dives into the questions of how to be reasonable and why it matters – in law, in our relationships, in morality and in political life.

Sara Wheeler

The history of Moscow was one of extreme violence from the start

‘Moscow is hard to love,’ Simon Morrison writes at the beginning of this engaging book, ‘but I love it.’ He deliberately sets out unconstrained by academic pieties, despite holding the post of Professor of Music and Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. He says he wrote A Kingdom and a Village ‘out of nostalgia for pre-oligarch decrepitude, when the world looked at Moscow with pity’. The Orthodox Church and the security services have been conjoined from the 16th century to the present The book is tripartite. The first part begins in 1147, when a prince named Yuri built a fort on a hill above a river. (When the authorities unveiled a monument to Yuri in 1954, Morrison reveals, a Muscovite yelled: ‘Doesn’t look like him.

Oliver Soden

Thoughtful fantasy: Travel Light, by Naomi Mitchison, reviewed

Naomi Mitchison is now renowned for being the author of ‘lost classics’ – famous for being forgotten. She lived to be 101 and wrote nearly as many books. She supported anti-Nazi movements in 1930s Vienna, ran a sexual health centre for women, became an octogenarian campaigner for nuclear disarmament and an ‘adviser and mother of the Bakgatla tribe in Botswana’. Despite two biographies and attempts to revive her masterpiece, The Corn King and the Spring Queen, she remains undervalued – perhaps because of her refusal to settle into one genre and her determination to venture into the territory of historical epic spiced with mythic ritual and dark magic. Travel Light was originally published in 1952 as a children’s book.

Harry Cochrane

W.H. Auden’s virtuosity masked careful craftsmanship

‘Begin with the name,’ begins Peter Ackroyd. ‘Wystan is singular and arresting. Auden himself... confessed that he would be furious if he found that anyone else possessed it.’ It is certainly a name on which much ink has been spilt. Ackroyd’s biography comes barely 18 months after Nicholas Jenkins’s The Island, an exhaustive study of the poet and his work up to 1939 and his flight to America. Unlike Jenkins’s book, Ackroyd’s has the advantage of being a life rather than a half-life, though it accelerates through the later years as Auden tipped into ‘premature old age’. The frequent quotations also help the pacing, though we might have wanted chunkier extracts from, say, ‘September 1st 1939’.

Wednesday

Alice Jolly

Fractured loyalties: The Tribe, by Michael Arditti, reviewed

Michael Arditti’s impressive and immersive family saga begins in Salonica (now Thessaloniki) in 1911 and follows the fortunes of the wealthy, powerful Carrache family who are part of the Sephardic Jewish community. They have lived in the city for two centuries and employ more than 1,000 people. The father of the family, Jacob, is ‘a well-known liberal’ who ‘would never compel his children to do anything against their will’; but he is outraged by his daughter Esther’s flirtations with socialism. So what will happen when he discovers his son Leon’s relationship with a nightclub singer? He also worries about his other three children: Ruben is reckless, Bella is artistic and Irène is overlooked.

Ian Sansom

Blockchain fantasies: My Bags Are Big, by Tibor Fischer, reviewed

If you long for that far-off time when novels were prepared to be hilariously funny, vulgar, caustic, wildly politically incorrect and highly improbable you are going to love My Bags Are Big. Tibor Fischer has always been happy to write against the pieties of the age, whatever they might be. He has often been compared with Martin Amis, but he’s Amis without the pose. If anything, as he ages, he’s more like a very funny, very British Michel Houellebecq. You get the sense he really means it: he feels it; the rage is for real. His astonishing debut novel Under the Frog (1992) turned postwar Hungary into a carnival of grotesques and established the mode for a lifetime of books that treat plot as scaffolding for his riffs and reflections on life, the universe and everything.

Stephen Sexton

Nintendo and the plumber who conquered the world

It’s not more than a parlour game, perhaps, to speculate about history’s most crucial inventions. One invention often makes the next possible. Electric light revolutionised human productivity, allowing us to work well beyond sundown. The combustion engine and later the turbine engine collapsed our sense of distance, putting other continents within a day’s travel. We’re still debating what the internet’s done; how social media offers the double-edged sword of instant communication and addressability for good and ill; how it encourages the avatarisation of ourselves as online presences. We’re both ourselves online and not quite ourselves, entirely embodied and yet psychically elsewhere. But then again, we’ve always experienced this on some level or another.

Lionel Barber

Lloyd Blankfein – guiding light of Goldman Sachs

Goldman Sachs inspires awe and envy in equal measure. Those who survive the Wall Street investment bank’s annual cull earn fortunes. Leavers join an alumni network that makes the Freemasons look like plodders. The ‘Government Sachs’ roll call includes prime ministers (Mark Carney, Mario Draghi, Rishi Sunak and Australia’s Malcolm Turnbull); US Treasury secretaries (Bob Rubin and Hank Paulson); and central bank governors galore, not to mention two recent BBC chairmen (Gavyn Davies and Richard Sharp).  After the global financial crisis, which Goldman navigated more adroitly than rivals, Rolling Stone compared the bank to ‘a vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity’. New York magazine ran a cover story which asked: ‘IS GOLDMAN SACHS EVIL?

Susie Mesure

The world destroyed by madness: Howl, by Howard Jacobson, reviewed

Rarely has such a short title worked harder than Howl, which Howard Jacobson takes from Allen Ginsberg’s incantatory 1955 poem. ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,’ Ginsberg wrote, a line that both prefaces Jacobson’s novel and sums up the author’s own angry anguish at the current madness in the corner of the Middle East that both Israelis and Palestinians call home. Make no mistake: Ginsberg’s poem puts the howl into Howard, who has written a characteristically crisp and deeply personal response to Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack – the massacre in the Negev Desert.

Christopher Shrimpton

Frederic Prokosch – the man who seemed to know everyone

One day Frederic Prokosch wrote a novel. He was 27 years old, living with his parents in New Haven, Connecticut, and desperate to be published. Leafing through an old atlas, he had visions of Lebanon and Syria, of the apricot trees of Damascus, the pilgrims travelling from Transcaucasia, and the Orontes River flowing among the rocks. His visions grew more vivid and the voices clearer: ‘I leaned forward in my chair and started to write as though mesmerised.’ The resultant book, The Asiatics, was an immediate success, praised by the likes of Thomas Mann, Albert Camus and André Gide. Others, however, were less sure. How could one write about Asia without ever having been there? Prokosch, it seemed, had quite the imagination.

Victor Sebestyen

Caught between Hitler and Bomber Command – the Berliners’ cruel predicament

Can you be a true, thoroughgoing patriot and still want your country to lose in a war? It’s a dilemma that faced countless thoughtful people in the past century who lived under totalitarian regimes, and I know is torturing many Russians today. It’s the stark question at the centre of Ian Buruma’s subtly nuanced and beautifully written book about the lives of Berliners in the second world war as their city was being destroyed by a combination of aerial bombardment and the manic cruelty of their own leaders.

Elisa Segrave

Chasing happiness: The Daffodil Days, by Helen Bain, reviewed

Is there anything more to be said about Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath? I didn’t think so, but Helen Bain’s debut novel The Daffodil Days proved me wrong. I did not expect to be absorbed, on the first page, by a woman cleaning a house (Court Green in Devon), the home Plath had just vacated with her two young children for London, where a couple of months later, in February 1963, she would gas herself.               Working backwards from December 1962, the novel describes the last 18 months of Plath’s life, glimpsed through some friends – writers and poets such as Al Alvarez, Bill Merwin and Marvin and Kathy Kane – but mostly through local people in or near the small Devon town of North Tawton.

Oliver Balch

When did you last see your siblings?

I recently arranged to have dinner with my brother and sister. No big occasion. Just a casual pub meal on a normal weeknight. As the eldest, my sister naturally chose the venue. As the youngest, my brother kept us entertained. Me, the middle child, I mostly sat and listened. It was fun. We caught up on news, reminisced, laughed and, true to form, studiously avoided any old hurts. As Catherine Carr reminds me in this lively and revealing book on the ins and outs of siblinghood, these two people have known me longer than almost anyone on the planet. When my parents pass, no one but them will understand what I mean by ‘guggy’ (a ragged baby blanket that never left my side) nor recall the giddy excitement of spending our sweetie money after Sunday morning swimming.

Tuesday

Allan Mallinson

The glory and tragedy of Trafalgar

The historian of naval warfare is to be envied by his land counterpart. The Duke of Wellington wrote to a confidant after Waterloo: The history of a [land] battle is not unlike the history of a ball. Some individuals may recollect all the little events of which the great result is the battle won or lost, but no individual can recollect the order in which, or the exact moment at which, they occurred, which makes all the difference as to their value or importance.

David Vaiani

The sorrows of the young Melvyn Bragg

The leaves had yet to fall as Melvyn Bragg left his native Cumbria and arrived in Oxford by train in the autumn of 1958 to read Modern History at Wadham College. Weighed down with suitcases, the grammar-school boy admired the town’s medieval core; but his first impression was of ‘effortless wealth and privilege everywhere’. Oxford was still largely dominated by public schoolboys, but it also featured those who had served in uniform, which added a note of gravitas to the atmosphere. On both counts, it was foreign terrain to Bragg, who pined for the familiar sights and sounds of his close-knit hometown of Wigton: ‘I could close my eyes and walk through it – as I often did to get to sleep.

Simon Ings

Seeing the trees for the wood

You’re up an oak tree somewhere between Ashtead and Epsom in Surrey. Wet lichens glow as you hunt for a footing on slick limbs. From the top of the canopy, the land turns to sea and glades appear as ‘oceans between continents of trees’. A ghostly armada of dead oaks lies becalmed in a clearing – a bleached collection of hulks left from a fire that happened decades ago. Like the titular character of Dr Seuss’s The Lorax, Luke Barley speaks for the trees, and his ambition is to make armchair woodlanders of us all. Ancient is his history of British woodlands – which turn out to be a lot more ancient but a lot less wild than the neophyte reader might expect. And if the history doesn’t grab you, there’s always the memoir.