More from Books

Thursday

William Leith

Soaked in blood and symbolism

We’re in Virginia, in the 1850s. A girl called Emily is tormenting her dog, Champion, and her father’s teenage slave, Rawls. Seeing this, Emily’s father, Bob, beats her with his belt and kicks the dog. Of Rawls, Bob says: ‘Now leave him be so he can get about my business!’ A girl, a dog, a slave, and a slave-owner.The owner addresses the girl with words and violence, and abuses the dog. He helps the slave get down from the fencepost he’s standing on. But he does not talk to the slave. He talks about the slave. Thinking this over, Rawls looks at Emily,‘sprawled out and wailing in the grass’, and envies her. Her pain is temporary; his is permanent.

Nicholas Lezard

Stories about stories

I wonder what your idea of a good novel is. Does it embody the attributes of solid plotting, characterisation and an impermeable membrane between invention and reality — the novel, that is, being a box from which nothing can leap out, and into which nothing, except what the author has chosen to put there, can leap in? And does it conform to the conventions laid down by the great writers of the 19th century? That’s what I assumed, during my schooldays; and the little that had filtered down to me of Don Quixote, which is claimed by many to be the ‘first’ novel, did not alert me to the fact that it was anything more than a story. As opposed to — to put it very simply indeed — a story about stories.

Henry Jeffreys

How to infuriate the French

Fine wine rarely makes it into the public consciousness, but one event in 1976 has proved of perennial interest: the so-called Judgment of Paris. It heralded the arrival of wine from the New World, but also tapped into popular prejudice. Who can resist French wine snobs being made to look foolish? So these memoirs by Steven Spurrier, the man behind that notorious tasting, have been keenly anticipated. It was a glass of 1908 Cockburns port that Spurrier tried at the age of 13 that sparked a lifelong interest in wine. Rather than go to university, as expected, he worked in the cellars of a wine merchant, Christopher’s, in Soho. In his early twenties he inherited £250,000 (the equivalent of £5 million today) when the family gravel business was sold.

Thursday

Niall Griffiths

Fast and furious | 14 June 2018

This new collection of John Edgar Wideman’s short stories comes across the pond as one of four handsomely packaged volumes from Canongate. Little known in this country, he towers large in his native States; a MacArthur Genius fellow, a PEN/Faulkner Award winner twice, winner of the Prix Femina Etranger last year, endorsed by Richard Ford and Caryl Phillips.... Old now, he has a lengthy list of publications behind him, and, on this latest evidence, carries a flame of rage against American injustice and prejudice that yet burns magma-hot.

James Bradley

A riot of in-jokes

Almost 120 years ago, the Australian writer Henry Lawson offered some counsel to those who came after him, writing that his advice to any young Australian writer whose talents have been recognised would be to go steerage, stow away, swim and seek London, Yankeeland or Timbucktoo rather than stay in Australia till his genius turn to gall or beer. Or failing this — and still in the interests of human nature and literature — to study elementary anatomy, especially as applies to the cranium, and then shoot himself carefully with the aid of a looking-glass.

Frances Wilson

Lessons from the Great Cham

The most irritating of recent publishing trends must be the literary self-help guide, and Henry Hitchings’s contribution to the genre will join a shelf now groaning with accounts of how Proust can change your life, how Adam Smith can change your life, what W.H. Auden can do for you, what Montaigne can tell us about how to live, what Tolstoy can teach us in troubled times, and a whole heap of nonsense about what Jane Austen has to say on the subjects of friendships, dating and getting married. The formula is simple: the workings of a vast and complex mind (the mind of Dr Johnson, said Boswell, resembled ‘the Coliseum at Rome’) are boiled down and served up, in bite-sized chunks, for a public assumed to no longer understand the purpose of literature, or how to read.

Susie Boyt

A sobering tale

The Recovering by Leslie Jamison, novelist, columnist, bestselling essayist and assistant professor at Columbia University, makes for bracing reading. Clever, bold, earnest and sometimes maddening, it is chiefly an account of the author’s alcohol addiction and the various stages of her recovery. It is also an examination of the lives and works, in so far as they pertain to drugs and alcohol, of ‘addicts of extraordinary talent’, such as Jean Rhys, John Berryman, Billie Holliday and David Foster Wallace. The book is an investigation of how Alcoholics Anonymous operates, its strengths and challenges, the leanings of its founders and a roll call of some of its members who’ve touched the author’s life.

Mark Mason

Abominably elusive

In 1969 the body of an ape-like creature, preserved in ice inside an insulated box, came to light in Minnesota. Its provenance was unclear, but the rumour went round that it was a Bigfoot, the North American equivalent of the Himalayan yeti. After two days peering through the box’s glass cover, the Belgian zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans convinced himself that the rumour was correct. His description of the Minnesota Iceman was published in the Bulletin of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences. It included the detail that ‘when erect, the penis would certainly not have been particularly striking in its dimensions’. As if this wasn’t bad enough for the poor animal, it later transpired that its penis, along with the rest of its body, was made of latex.

Mika Ross-Southall

A spy in la-la land

In 1940, the British Security Coordination sent an agent with an assistant to a Hollywood film studio to help promote the British war effort in America. This is the inspiration behind Louise Levene’s enjoyable new novel Happy Little Bluebirds. Here, though, the assistant — Evelyn Murdoch, who was working at the Postal Censorship department in Woking — discovers that she was drafted in by mistake: HQ didn’t read her file properly and assumed she was a man (‘Red faces all round,’ a British Intelligence worker tells Evelyn when she arrives in the United States), which is one of the only moments in the narrative that feels stretched. The agent who Evelyn is meant to assist has gone to Bermuda for an unspecified length of time.

Boyd Tonkin

The heart of Colombia’s darkness

What makes Colombia remind me of Ireland? It’s not only the soft rain that falls from grey skies on the emerald uplands around Bogotá. In both countries, ingrained habits of courtesy and charm can smooth over the jagged rifts left by a history of strife. Raised in Bogotá, and living there again after a decade in Barcelona, Juan Gabriel Vásquez writes novels in which elegant mazes of legend and rumour lead, step by graceful step, into the guilty secrets of ‘this country sick with hatred’. Perhaps only an accident of genius enthroned Gabriel García Márquez, with his hyperbolic Caribbean imagination, as the carnival king of his nation’s fiction.

John Hare

Swallowed by the Russian Bear

In the 13th century, having overrun and terrorised Europe as far as Budapest, and in the process possibly bringing with them the flea which caused the Black Death, the heirs to Genghis Khan and the Golden Horde had also conquered territory to the east as far as the Korean peninsular. The assiduous Swiss scholar and explorer Christoph Baumer chronicles the ensuing sagas of the remaining individual khanates in great detail. But by the 16th century it is clear that although a few pockets still flourished, producing impressive buildings and works of art, these erstwhile mighty nomadic clans had sunk to a point where they had disappeared from the consciousness of the outside world.

Houman Barekat

A very bourgeois revolution

The narrator-protagonist of D.J. Taylor’s new novel, a mild-mannered Oxford graduate named Nick Du Pont, has resisted the lure of a proper career to become a publicist for a flower-pop group called the Helium Kids. The story begins in 1964, with Nick and the band in the United States. It’s the year of the Civil Rights Act, and the Helium Kids’ entire tour is set in venues along the Mason–Dixon Line, prompting Nick to reflect on the ‘terrible, pulled-both-ways wonder of 1960s America’. He returns to the UK to find that here, too, the old world is giving way to the new: ‘There are houses going up all over the west side of Norwich. The girls stop being called Kate and Margaret and Mary and start being called Samantha and Jennifer and Suzanne.

Horatio Clare

In the eye of the storm

‘We are globalisation,’ a senior executive at the shipping company Maersk told me. ‘We enable it, and we have questions about it too, but we ask them in isolation.’ He then granted me leave to travel on Maersk vessels wheresoever I wished in order to write a book about shipping and seafarers, promising that Maersk’s lawyers would not vet the manuscript before publication. Maersk have little to fear from writers. The giant corporation is effectively public-relations proof (if they stopped their ships’ engines today there would be a worldwide supply crisis the day after tomorrow). Moreover, Maersk is among the industry’s leaders, confident that whatever I found would be better, or no worse, than average standards at sea.

Ian Thomson

Of human bondage

Zora Neale Hurston, the African-American novelist-ethnographer, was a luminary of the New Negro Movement, later renamed by American scholars the Harlem Renaissance. ‘Harlemania’ took off in jazz-age New York, as white thrill-seekers danced to Duke Ellington hothouse stomps and enthused over so-called primitive art. Hurston made a ‘black splash’ of her own in 1920s Harlem. Among her admirers was the dance critic and photographer Carl Van Vechten, whose deliciously Firbankian 1926 account of life uptown, Nigger Heaven, gloried in blackamoor jungle dances and other Uncle Tom minstrelsy. (‘Period piece’ would be the most charitable description.

Thursday

Caroline Crampton

A late winged victory

At first glance, the 17th-century natural historian Francis Willughby is an ideal subject for a biography. He lived in interesting times, as the adage goes. He was born in 1635, seven years before the start of the English civil war, and after a youth spent under Cromwell’s rule, came of age as the monarchy was restored. He was a landowner, and travelled extensively in Europe. Best of all, he mixed with many of the celebrated minds of his time. As an original member of what became the Royal Society, Willughby included in his circle Sir Christopher Wren, John Evelyn, Robert Hooke and John Wilkins. Why, then, has his life never been written until now?

Zoë Apostolides

The dark side of the sunshine state

Over the past decade Lauren Groff has written three novels; she now returns to the short story form in this, her second collection. Last year she was named as one of the best young American novelists by Granta, a reputation that’s been growing since the 2015 publication of her critically acclaimed Fates and Furies, a sprawling portrait of a marriage nominated by Barack Obama as his book of the year. Groff, originally from New York, lives in Florida, and these 11 stories take that state as their focus — a place where panthers prowl perimeters, 15ft-alligators glide through the swamps and air-conditioners ‘crouch like trolls under the windows’.

Simon Kuper

A fine balance | 7 June 2018

Arguably, the statue in Trafalgar Square should not be of Nelson but of Henry Maudslay. He had started out as a 12-year-old powder monkey, fetching gunpowder on Navy ships, but soon revealed himself to be a brilliant engineer. In the early 1800s, Maudslay built ‘the first precision-made machines in the world’. They produced pulley blocks, ‘the essential parts of a sailing ship’s rigging’, which allowed the Royal Navy to ‘travel, police, and, for a while, rule the world’s oceans’, writes Simon Winchester. The machines outfitted the ships that defeated Maudslay’s hero, Napoleon.

Daniel Swift

Shakespeare’s eerie genius

‘What country, friends, is this?’ asks Viola at the start of Twelfth Night. She is shipwrecked and heartbroken; she does not know where she is, nor does she really care. Shakespeare is fascinated by strange places, and by how familiar places may become strange; how the world looks different if we look at it from an unexpected angle. But he also often returns to the opposite idea: that geographical and historical distance is ultimately trivial, and all places are the same. He sets a play in ancient Rome, but mentions a chiming clock. He sets a play in Venice, but none of the characters is aware of the canals. He is uninterested in difference. For Shakespeare, everything is here and now.

A.S.H. Smyth

A story from a grain of sand

In 1945, on a Putney side street, in a city full of darkness and half in rubble from the Blitz, the 14-year-old Nathaniel and his sister are abandoned by their parents into the care of men they think may well be criminals. Their father is still troubled as a result of the war; their mother close to stories from the present. Left to his own devices, Nathaniel sees the world in terms of shipping routes, and learns London’s geography (or an earlier form of it) by barging on the Thames with smuggled greyhounds. In a house full of odd comings and goings, and ‘dangerous with secrets’, his new confrères include an Aramaicist ethnographer, a lusty St Lucian pot-washer and a girl whom Nathaniel names, out of necessity, after the street on which they first met.

Simon Ings

A Buddhist garden of earthly delights

The Tibetan artist and poet Gendun Chopel was born in 1903. He was identified as an incarnate lama, and ordained as a Buddhist monk. In 1934 he renounced his vows, quit Tibet for India, learned Sanskrit and — if his long poem, usually translated as A Treatise on Passion, is to be taken at face value — copulated with every woman who let him. Twelve years later he returned to Tibet, and was thrown into prison on trumped-up charges. The experience broke him. He died of cirrhosis in 1951, as troops of China’s People’s Liberation Army were marching through the streets of Lhasa. Chopel’s reputation as the most important Tibetan writer of the 20th century is secure, mostly through his travelogue, Grains of Gold.