More from Books

Tuesday

Michael Arditti

Into the wild: Country People, by Daniel Mason, reviewed

In his mid-forties, Miles Krzelewski is a graduate student who makes Saul Bellow’s Herzog look like an academic overachiever. After 14 years and 11 changes of subject – including Rabelais’s monsters, Chekhov’s early humour and Tolstoy’s train journeys and farming techniques – he has yet to complete his doctoral thesis. When his wife, Kate, a respected Milton and Blake scholar, is offered a one-year visiting professorship at a rural Vermont college, Miles is thrilled, convinced that a pastoral life will afford him the inspiration he needs for his latest project – a study of Russian peasant folklore. Together with their children, 12-year-old Wesley and nine-year-old Olive, plus their dog, Giuseppe, they undertake the long journey from their Californian home.

James Ball

How the multi-billion-dollar wellness industry is putting us at risk

No one could accuse Dr Nick Tiller of taking health and wellness issues lightly. In his latest book he recounts an occasion in which a friend asked him whether he was an extrovert or an introvert – the kind of question most of us would treat as small talk to pass the time. Tiller, though, took it seriously. What did she mean by those terms, he asked, hearing in response that it depended on whether he got energy from being around others, or not. OK, then: what did she mean by energy? ‘At this point,’ he writes, ‘she got frustrated and didn’t speak to me for the rest of her wedding. Which was awkward, since I was the best man.

Huw Nesbitt

Whimsical defence mechanisms: Sail Away Land, by Ben Pester, reviewed

A spectre is haunting England in the surreal tales assembled in Ben Pester’s Sail Away Land, the follow-up to his debut collection Am I in the Right Place? (2020) and last year’s novel The Expansion Project: the spectre of tweeness. Confronted with scenarios involving nightmarish gatherings, paranormal entities and psychic electronic devices, his characters respond with a lobotomised, quaint strain of stoicism – the type that makes us say things like ‘It’ll come out in the wash’ when getting made redundant, and ‘Least said…’ when handed a terminal diagnosis. ‘You have left the grill on!’ repeatedly frets the title story’s nameless protagonist, like a Tony Hancock character, oblivious to the fact he is also apparently shrinking to the size of a rat.

David Honigmann

Why most scientists don’t want us to believe in life on Mars

‘Is there life on Mars?,’ asked David Bowie, and would not stay for an answer. The astrobiologist Steven Benner has an answer – which is that Mars not only has had life but still does. The first part of that answer is broadly accepted; the second remains highly contentious. His book is a scattershot plea for increased attention to be paid to searching for evidence – or, as he sees it, more evidence. The stakes are high. As he says in his introduction, if life exists only on Earth, that’s a coincidence; if it exists on Earth and a close neighbour, that’s the start of a pattern. Mars has always excited the imagination. No one has ever speculated hubristically about the chances of anything coming from Mercury. C.S.

Susie Mesure

A broken bond: Gaining Ground, by Joan Barfoot, reviewed

When a girl turns up at an isolated cabin in Canada, unannounced and uninvited, the woman busy thinning the lettuce has no idea who the stranger is. But then the woman has trouble remembering even her own name. ‘“Are you Abra Phillips?” asks the girl. “Am I?” the woman ponders, conscious that the words “mean something” to the girl,’ writes Joan Barfoot in the opening pages of Gaining Ground, a Canadian feminist classic now republished nearly 50 years after it first appeared as a debut novel entitled Abra. ‘I think, finally, that I must be; there is no one else to connect with this name,’ continues the protagonist, who we soon learn has been alone in the cabin for the past nine years, all but living off the land after walking out on her family.

Mark Piesing

The West has become its own worst enemy

On 27 January 2024, Iranian-backed militants launched a one-way attack drone at the US base known as Tower 22 in the Syria-Iraq borderlands. It hit and killed three American soldiers and injured many other members of the 350-strong garrison. The attack was a pivotal moment. Before it, no US ground troops had been killed by an enemy aircraft since the Korean War. But they had been now, and would be again. Two years later, a similar attack, this time by Iran itself, evaded US air defences, hit a US command centre in Kuwait and killed six personnel. It was the deadliest Iranian strike of the recent conflict. Steve Feldstein is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, an expert on technology, democracy and national security and an award-winning author.

Michael Taube

A high seas adventure unlike any other

When the American shipbuilder Enos Bright constructed the Mentor in 1807 he had no inkling of the tale it would one day tell from its watery grave. Many ships faced harrowing voyages on the high seas, but this one stood out more than others. It was an expedition that turned into a disaster that few could have foreseen. Eric Jay Dolin brings this long-forgotten story back into the public eye. The author of 17 books that have largely focused on maritime history, he is a talented researcher and natural storyteller. ‘The Mentor,’ he writes, ‘is not just another example of a shipwreck during the Age of Sail. It is one of the most complex and intriguing of such stories ever told.

James Bradley

The good, the bad and the grotesque: the mind-blowing diversity of parasites

The oldest surviving sentence ever written in the first alphabet is inscribed on an ivory comb found in the ruins of the Canaanite city of Lachish in what today is Israel. Dating back around 3,700 years, it offers the owner a blessing of sorts: ‘May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard.’ As Dino J. Martins points out in his marvellously entertaining tour of the netherworld of parasites, the comb (the design of which is almost indistinguishable from the plastic ones we use for the same purpose today) speaks of the depth of the human relationship with lice – creatures that have travelled with us, fed on us and multiplied with us for millions of years. Martins is the perfect guide.

Annie Walton Doyle

Down memory lane: It Will Come Back to You, by Sigrid Nunez, reviewed

Readers of Sigrid Nunez’s long-form fiction will be familiar with her concerns about storytelling: the gaps between what happened, what is remembered and what can be understood only through fictionalising. Her new collection of 13 stories, written across several decades, returns to questions of memory and the unreliability of narrative. The stories tend to have mundane settings: an insomniac awake late at night; a traveller stranded by a flight delay. Nunez is less interested in dramatic incidents than in the way a passing encounter can alter one’s understanding of life. Her narrators frequently find themselves re-evaluating past certainties or realising that events they thought they’d understood resist neat explanations.

Emily Rhodes

Revelling in the music of words

There’s a chapter in this mostly illuminating and occasionally irritating book in which the author – the award-winning writer of The Hours and other acclaimed novels – explains why he no longer reads reviews of his work. The decision was prompted first by an ‘excoriating’ hatchet job by Michiko Kakutani, erstwhile lead literary critic of the New York Times. ‘A worse review is difficult to imagine,’ Cunningham notes, claiming that he has ‘mostly repressed the memory’ of its contents, though he does share his rather macabre plan for revenge: to slip a copy of the book into her coffin so that ‘extra-terrestrial archaeologists’ will assume she wanted to be buried with it.

Tuesday

Alex Peake-Tomkinson

Unlucky break: All In, by Claire Powell, reviewed

Claire Powell’s first novel, At the Table (2022), delineated a year in the life of the Maguire family from south London – a separating couple and their adult children – with each chapter revolving around a meal. This was done so cleverly that not only did it not seem gimmicky, it was not even immediately obvious. The book won many plaudits, including from Philip Hensher and Marian Keyes. All In is even better.  Jo and Dave are about to go on a trip with Dave’s investment broker brother, Teddy, Teddy’s girlfriend, Kayla, and Dave and Teddy’s father, Alan. The brothers’ mother, Val, has recently died. The holiday has been paid for by Teddy, much to Dave’s discomfort.

Lindsay Johns

New York crime caper: Cool Machine, by Colson Whitehead, reviewed

Cool Machine, the final novel in Colson Whitehead’s Harlem trilogy (following Harlem Shuffle and Crook Manifesto), is another tour de force and a fitting conclusion to the Uptown peregrinations of his endearing protagonist Ray Carney, a successful Harlem furniture salesman and part-time fence. It’s an old-school crime caper, set in 1980s New York against the backdrop of Mayor Koch’s rapidly gentrifying city, told in three interconnected sections excoriating Reagan-era capitalism. The ubiquitous construction works, graffiti and corruption are fuelled by the twin deities of power and money.

Bryan Appleyard

Why spiders deserve our respect, not fear or disgust

I had not thought much about spiders until I read Maria Tatar’s Arachnomania; now I can think of little else. I even watched a film mentioned in the book – Eight-Legged Freaks. It was awful, though it did bring home how very scared people can be of spiders, especially large ones. But, as Tatar shows, spiders are also part of human history and culture; and they really are different. I use fly sprays to get rid of insect intruders. I would never now use them against arachnids as well. Tatar was first drawn to spiders by the Covid pandemic which locked us all down. It was then she discovered that the eight-legged freaks offered the possibility of ‘finding a model for survival and creativity in times of seclusion, darkness and gloom’. They are, as we shall see, paragons of survival.

David Vernon

Adolescent anxieties: Schoolgirl, by Osamu Dazai, reviewed

In June 1948, the writer Osamu Dazai and his last love, Tomie Yamazaki, drowned themselves in the Tamagawa Aqueduct near Tokyo. It was a murky ending to a life which had begun in wealth and social status but which rapidly descended into alcoholism, depression, impoverishment – and literary genius. During his short life – he died at 38 – Dazai produced a substantial body of work: novels and stories which helped define Japanese literature of the 1930s and 1940s and which are enjoying a significant global reputation now. Often autobiographical in nature, playing games with the blurred borders between reality and illusion, they chart disordered, chaotic lives, exploring isolation, poverty and debauchery with a sly wit and brutal honesty.

Elisa Segrave

When Mum went marching with the EDL

Nicola Wilding is a documentary film producer, whose family was originally rural working class. Aged 60, her mother, Sandra, prompted by the hacking to death of the soldier Lee Rigby, unexpectedly joined the English Defence League (EDL) and went on marches headed by Tommy Robinson. During a series of disappointing liaisons with men, including two marriages, she had brought up four children, lived in two different countries, moved often within the UK, got into debt, worked in several low-paid jobs, including one at an Omagh army camp pub, and, despite early heart trouble, ended up as a dedicated employee in care homes throughout Covid. She told her daughter she’d got tired of ‘the bloody lefty media’ which only told one side of a story.

Tom Payne

Why Cicero’s life and times have never seemed more relevant

How should we think about Cicero? He was the orator who claimed that he did his best to save the Roman Republic from decadence. To more recent readers, he has come to seem regressive as well as ridiculous: he opposed the redistribution of land and loathed the idea of doling out grain rations. But it’s his self-promotion that makes us roll our eyes. Early in her biography, Catharine Edwards understates the obvious: ‘False modesty was never Cicero’s problem.’ What she does best throughout her surprisingly page-turning account is to reveal Cicero through his own words. (Admittedly, she has many, many words to choose from.) She quotes him reflecting on an early, junior role as a quaestor in Sicily: ‘What Sicilian quaestor has won greater renown or popularity?

Tuesday

Keith Miller

An alternative Paris: Château Rouge, by Amit Chaudhuri, reviewed

Nearly ten years ago, the author, critic and classical Indian musician Amit Chaudhuri took up a visiting fellowship in Paris. It’s not quite clear from the pages of his autobiographical novel Château Rouge which branch of his professional life was to be nurtured by the experience, officially at least, but a glance at this slim hardback, liberally adorned with creative white space, will tell you that it is a book which leaves many things unsaid. Chaudhuri is determined to escape the oppressive influence of the many other writers who have gone before him, to try to see this great city afresh. Chief among these is inevitably Ernest Hemingway, a man with whom, on the face of things, Chaudhuri would have little to talk about if they were to meet.

Philip Womack

Bringing Homer into the home: how the Iliad and Odyssey became widely available

Homer’s ghost is particularly busy, popping up in the dreams of pretty much every poet going. In fact if you are a poet and haven’t been visited by Homer, you may find yourself wondering why you’ve been left out. The cultural reach of the two major poems that appear under Homer’s name – the Iliad and the Odyssey – is undeniable. I teach my creative writing students that there are only two stories: the siege and the journey, and there they are, right at the beginning of literary history. They’ve been read continuously for centuries. On my shelves is an edition of Alexander Pope’s Iliad which belonged to my great-great-great-grandfather, in which are still bits of paper put in by subsequent family members.

Andrew Rosenheim

A feast of wartime espionage: the latest crime fiction

Do novelists need credentials? Once, almost a century ago, the vogue for hard-boiled fiction meant that in the masculine Hemingway hegemony then holding sway, novelists needed to be graduates of the ‘University of Life’. Writers, it was argued, had to spend their apprenticeship riding the rails, tending bar in tough-guy saloons and doing almost any work that could be described as manual labour.  This changed postwar, with greater affluence and millions more people in higher education, including women. Among them were a growing number taking postgraduate degrees in creative writing – most famously at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, but followed quite credibly in this country at the University of East Anglia.

Jason Burke

Terrorists with a taste for luxury: the flamboyance of the Baader-Meinhof gang

In the summer of 1970, a group of West German radical activists flew from Berlin to the Middle East. They wanted to acquire the necessary skills to launch a campaign of urban warfare against what they considered to be the fascist regime in their homeland. This would be their contribution to the global struggle against imperialism and capitalism that they believed was under way worldwide. Thousands of western European left-wing activists travelled to the Middle East out of sympathy with the Palestinian nationalist cause in the late 1960s.