More from Books

Thursday

James Mcnamara

Hopes and dreams

Twenty-odd pages into Michelle de Kretser’s The Life to Come, I pounded the table and bellowed an Australian-accented ‘fuck yeah!’ This startled my wife, who startled the cat, which startled my gin and tonic into my lap. But it was worth it, and remains my unvarnished critical opinion. To varnish it a bit: The Life to Come is de Kretser’s sixth book, her first full-length novel since her 2013 Miles Franklin Award, and for my money one of the best to have been published in Australia in the past decade.

Emily Rhodes

Running for her life

Françoise Frenkel was a Polish Jew, who adored books and spent much of her early life studying and working in Paris. Her passion for French literature led her to open the first French bookshop in Berlin in 1921, a resounding success in spite of the predominantly Francophobe sentiment in Germany following the first world war. She happily reminisces over its ‘curiously mixed clientele’: ‘Famous artists, celebrities and well-heeled women pore over the fashion magazines, speaking in hushed tones so as not to disturb the philosopher buried in his Pascal.’ It soon became a place of readings, lectures, plays and parties and an essential stop for any French writer passing through Berlin.

Melanie McDonagh

Fairy tales for feisty girls

This being the centenary of women’s suffrage, there’s an unmissable feminist aspect to children’s books right now. Stories about strong girls, fictional and historical, are everywhere. (The worst example of the genre, I may say, was Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls.) Well, if it’s feisty girl stories you’re after, you could do much worse than Hilary McKay’s Fairy Tales, which are written with terrific brio and have umpteen resolute heroines. If you like your fairy stories as you remember them, this may not be for you, but these retellings of the classics are done in an affectionate spirit. ‘If I ever wrote a book with love, it’s this one,’ says the author.

Jason Goodwin

Fear of little men

When this survey of British fairydom arrived I turned to the chapter on Dorset to read about the little people of my county. After a survey of place names referring to the ‘puca’, which may or not connect with Shakespeare’s Puck, I received the disheartening news that Dorset wasn’t very good for fairies, and that there was even ‘something surprising about the absence of elves’. So I did what I was supposed to have done first, and read the introduction. Magical Folk is a collection of folklore essays, topographically arranged, and its editors welcome ‘the digitisation of millions of pages of British and Irish newspapers,’ which has allowed researchers to Google fairies from ‘200-year-old pages of ephemera’.

A. E. Stallings

A long way home

Until recently, it seemed we were living in an age of Iliads. Since 2007, the ancient Homeric epic has been translated into English at least seven times (including by Caroline Alexander, the first woman to do so). Yet the Iliad’s sequel, the Odyssey — about war’s aftermath, the home front and the difficult return to civilian life — is just as topical. And with its greater emphasis on female characters and different walks of life, it should appeal to a broader audience. Until now, it has not been translated into English by a woman. Does this make a difference? Emily Wilson, in the introduction to her sleek translation, argues that it does.

Patrick Skene-Catling

The Mutiny and the bounty

Sullying the glorious sunshine, sand and sea, Miami in the 1940s, when I first ventured there, was already overcrowded, vulgar and exorbitant. It got a lot worse. By the early 1980s, the period to which this sensational criminal history is devoted, it had become the capital of Cubans in exile and America’s most prosperous cocaine entrepot, where the annual murder rate was more than 300. Attempts to impose law and order were handicapped by corrupt police, a corrupt judiciary and corrupt juries.

Honor Clerk

Figures in a landscape | 25 January 2018

Martin Caiger-Smith’s huge monograph on Antony Gormley slides out of its slipcase appropriately enough like a block of cast iron. In its beautiful rust-coloured linen covers it looks a bit like a block of cast iron, too. Open it to the endpapers, ‘Bodies in Space’, and black splatters across a white ground. Turn a couple of thick, silky pages and a frail human figure, photographed from behind, is silhouetted on a rocky precipice facing an abyss of roiling water, cloud and spray. Keep turning and the developing story of Gormley’s life’s work reveals itself in image after remarkable image.

Thursday

Elaine Showalter

The maker and the monster

There are few more seductive figures for biographers than Mary Shelley. The daughter of the radical philosopher and novelist William Godwin and the great feminist thinker Mary Wollstonecraft (who died a few days after giving birth to her), she ran away with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley at 16; wandered through Europe with him; bore their four children; married him; became the friend and companion of the other Young Romantics and their lovers; and at 18 wrote the classic Gothic novel Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus.

William Rees

In times of trouble | 18 January 2018

‘People live in the space between the realities of their lives and the hopes they have for them,’ muses the octogenarian Robert at the start of Turning for Home, helpfully establishing the novel’s major theme. Little ventriloquised cogitations like this cover Barney Norris’s second novel like fingerprints, giving the game away. Robert is a newly widowed retired civil servant, who, after a life of patriarchal and political responsibilities, is haunted by his newfound obsolescence. This ghost also haunts the novel’s other protagonist, Robert’s 25-year-old granddaughter Kate; a year lost to anorexia has left her estranged from a life that has only just begun (‘I would look at my phone and see only the echoes of the life I’d lost’).

Kate Webb

A friend in need

The title of Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go Went Gone, and the autumnal tone of its beginning — a classics professor retires, leaving him at home raking leaves, mulling over memories of his wife and wondering about the body in a nearby lake — suggests that this will be a book of endings, something akin to Anita Brookner’s stories of self-absorbed people in the twilight of their lives. But Richard, now professor emeritus, proves to be a more unpredictable character. Unlike many of Brookner’s loners, there is the strong force of history in him. A precarious beginning under fascism and war, then a life shaped by the GDR and its abrupt cessation in 1989, has left him and his circle of friends adrift in the new Germany.

Alan Judd

The call of the Wren

This book is a thoroughly researched account of the parts played by women in the service of the Royal Navy from the Middle Ages to the present. What it lacks in anecdotes and personal accounts it makes up for in its comprehensive documentation of official attitudes and measures. Women have served in — or, more accurately, with — the Royal Navy for longer than we might think. There are medieval references to women accompanying their husbands on voyages, including the Crusades, and to women serving as launderers, cooks, nurses and prostitutes (possibly all four). Ladies of the Cinque Ports — Hastings, Dover, Sandwich, Romney and Hythe — were the most likely to sail. One source claimed that older women ‘washed the clothes and heads [of the sailors]….

Jonathan Steinberg

Massacre of the innocents

I thought I knew the history of the years 1914 to 1945: the first world war and the terrible casualties in the trenches; the second world war and the German conquest of Europe; day and night bombing; Stalingrad and the Holocaust. But I’m embarrassed to say that I knew nothing about the tragedy in Galicia in Eastern Europe. Unlike the Nazi genocide, much of the killing took place between neighbour and neighbour: Jews, Poles and Ukrainians destroyed each other with increasing ferocity and brutality between 1914 and the 1940s. The beautiful city of Buczacz in Eastern Galicia, with its Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox and Jewish shrines, ended as a gigantic ruin.

Horatio Clare

Poison in Paradise

Eton turns out prime ministers of various stripes and patches, but it also forges fine explorers. It seems to prepare its alumni perfectly for flying snakes, scorpions so large you can put leads on them and leeches in waving battalions; titanic drinking and dancing ceremonies (our explorer, Robin Hanbury-Tenison, suffers repeated blistering on the dance floor); the friendship of head-hunters; and for the exacting business of leading world-protecting, people-nurturing expeditions into the planet’s wild and vulnerable regions. In the school’s natural history museum, pupils can now see a parang, presented to Hanbury-Tenison by his tribal friends, its handle shaped like a hornbill, its razor-sharp edge responsible for hacking off more than 100 heads.

Thursday

Dominic Green

The eternal visionary

On 3 September 1968, Allen Ginsberg appeared on William F. Buckley’s Firing Line. Buckley exposed Ginsberg’s politics as fatuous — the blarney, stoned — but Ginsberg stole the aesthetic victory by reading ‘Wales Visitation’, a homage to William Blake. ‘White fog lifting and falling on mountain brow,’ Ginsberg intones, ‘…teeming ferns/ exquisitely swayed/ along a green crag/ glimpsed through mullioned glass in valley rain.’ ‘Nice,’ Buckley nods. He lets Ginsberg read the whole poem.

Justin Marozzi

Reconsider Phlebas

So the Phoenicians never existed. Herodotus, that unreliable old fibber, made it all up in the Histories. Is this really what Josephine Quinn is saying, or is it just a cunning ruse to stir up a fuss and infuriate the dwindling band of Herodoteans out there? Because Quinn, a professor of ancient history at Oxford University, declares that her mission is not so much to rescue the Phoenicians from their ‘undeserved obscurity’ so much as to argue that there were no such people. ‘It is modern nationalism that has created the Phoenicians,’ she writes, citing 19th-century French, English and German historians who spoke of the Phoenician ‘people’ and ‘nation’ in the age of the nation state.

Patrick Flanery

A brutal race

More than 25 years ago, Peter Carey co-wrote one of the most audacious road movies ever made, Wim Wenders’s Until the End of the World, which circles the globe before concluding with a long interlude in the Australian outback. While the film was in the mode of speculative science fiction and Carey’s captivating A Long Way from Home is a fiercely realist story set in the 1950s, this new book nonetheless shares both that earlier work’s fascination with outsiders whose lives spin off in unpredictable directions, and as a profound reverence for Australia’s interior and its people.

Keith Miller

Dangerous living

Here come three novels marketed as debuts but written by authors with some sort of previous, be it in short stories, journalism, theatre, television or a combination of the above. The Alarming Palsy of James Orr by Tom Lee (Granta, £12.99) takes a fable and transplants it into real life — in this case bourgeois southern British suburban life — where the neat conclusions we might draw from it if we encountered it in a more distilled form are muffled and made strange. The exemplar of Kafka is obvious (both Metamorphosis and The Trial); but I found myself thinking also of John Cheever, Richard Yates and other American writers who needle away at the pain and self-delusion behind the sleek lives of the executive class.

Kate Womersley

The germ of a revolutionary idea

Every operation starts the same way. Chlorhexidine scrubbed under nails, lathered over wet hands, palm-to-palm, fingers interlaced, thumbs, wrists, forearms. A soothing routine accompanied by the sound of water hitting a steel trough sink. Washing is an act of safety but also humility. It acknowledges a doctor’s capacity to cause disease as well as cure it. More than once I have thought of Joseph Lister — the father of antisepsis (killing germs) and forefather of asepsis (excluding germs completely) — as I perform this hygienic set-piece. Not that he would have liked the idea of me, his sister’s great-great-great granddaughter, studying medicine.

Tim Stanley

Father of the nation

Franklin D. Roosevelt isn’t as popular as he once was. When Barack Obama won the 2008 election, he let it be known that he was reading a book about FDR, and tumbleweed blew through the newsrooms. Which is odd because for many decades FDR was every bit the model liberal as Ronald Reagan was the model conservative. Roosevelt was credited with ending the Great Depression, laying the foundations of a welfare state and leading America through the second world war — achievements for which he was rewarded with not one, not two but four election victories. And he did all of this despite being an elitist East Coaster with a wife who was very probably a lesbian.

Emily Hill

A girl with green eyes

I loved a man. But our affair was nasty, brutish and short. Copious weeping was my un-tart retort. All that’s left of him is a stained T-shirt. I must rid my mind of him now. That’s long overdue. But how? These three books seem to present three answers. I’ve been wonkily underlining whole paragraphs and brooding over what to do. Nowadays, if you admit to being heartbroken after the fact you’re treated as a malingerer. So I very much appreciated Giulia Sissa’s Jealousy: A Forbidden Passion — a scholarly defence of indulging your violent fury. In the age of Tinder, your next paramour is but a thumb-swipe away, so the attitude is: ‘They don’t love you. Why would you care? It’s all in your head. It’s all in your past.