More from Books

Thursday

Stuart Kelly

A barren prospect

In many ways this is a very old-fashioned novel. Jerome is 53, and a lacklustre professor at Columbia; his wife, Sylvie, 35, is a former topless dancer and aspiring film-maker. Sylvie has a dog but wants a baby. Together they will cross the former Soviet bloc looking for a child of their own, despite Sylvie having already had three abortions: Romania is their chosen finale, where, of course, orphans are two-a-penny. There is much to admire in it; but the clever bits aren’t funny and the funny bits aren’t clever. The novel is littered with references to continental theorists. Blanchot, Lefebvre, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Guattari, Lacan all show up — poor old Derrida, left out! — but they are there as intellectual window-dressing.

James Bartholomew

The disgrace of the British left

Giles Udy did not start out with the intention of writing this book. He was in Russia about 15 years ago and happened to hear about Norilsk, a remote, frozen part of Siberia where the Soviet Union had established forced labour camps. Udy managed to get permission to visit the place. The temperature there could fall to as low as 50C and many thousands died due to this, low rations and barbaric treatment. The inmates were too weak to dig deep graves in the ice-hardened ground for the ones who died, so sometimes the slow movement of the Earth still brings bones to the surface. Udy’s original idea was to write about the 300,000 people who passed through Norilsk over the years.

Sara Wheeler

The greatest survival story

This is the story of a 16th-century Portuguese knight and mariner who survived alone on a lump of volcanic rock in the South Atlantic for 26 years. The island was St Helena, and Fernão Lopes is the ‘other exile’ of the book’s title, in contrast to Napoleon, who pitched up 300 years later. But Lopes’s lonely sojourn was self-imposed. He was born in Lisbon in Portugal’s Golden Age, when Manuel I embarked on an ambitious period of expansion and ushered his nation into the ranks of the great European powers. Lopes was not of noble line, but had a good education and rigorous military training and rose to become a servant of the king, sailing to India in 1506 as an officer in a 15-ship armada with the explorer Tristao da Cunha.

Anthony Cummins

The evil that men do

Early one summer’s morning in 1994, Paul Jennings Hill, a defrocked Presbyterian minister, gunned down a doctor, John Britton, as he arrived for work at an abortion clinic in Florida. Unrepentant by the time of his execution nine years later, Hill (who I really don’t recommend Googling) was associated with the Army of God (ditto), which urges the murder — or ‘justifiable homicide’ — of abortion providers in the United States. Given how often Joyce Carol Oates’s awesomely prolific output concerns male violence and women’s bodies, it’s no surprise to find her using this as material; with Trump vowing to undo Roe vs Wade, it’s timely.

Patrick Skene-Catling

Verse and worse

Molly Brodak, a fair, young Polish-American born in Michigan, is a winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize. Iowa: that hotbed of academic creative writing! Her poems, published in A Little Middle of the Night, are intensely private, pointillist compositions of unconnected images. Now, teaching at Emory University in Atlanta, she has written her first book of prose, which is entirely different, an intimate communication in clear language of shocking candour. Without any evident self-pity, it is as frankly accusative and confessional as an ideal patient’s revelations on a psychiatric couch. Molly analyses her family and herself, evidently achieving understanding, perhaps even forgiveness, of some excruciating emotional entanglements.

David Butterfield

She-devils on horseback

Rumour will run wild about a society of warrior women, somehow free from the world of men. We all feel we know the Amazons, even if we struggle to connect them with the planet’s largest rainforest, river and internet company. But the historical reality of that thrilling and threatening tribe proves to be elusive. Even two millennia ago, the Greek geographer Strabo marvelled at his fellow men’s credulity about the Amazons: ‘the same stories are told now as in early times, although they are wondrous and beyond belief.’ Now John Man, the enthusiastic historian of Asia, dissects the Amazons with sharp scalpel and acute scepticism.

Paul Levy

Patience on a monument

As a food writer Patience Gray (1917–2005) merits shelf-space with M.F.K. Fisher, Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson. Fleeing from the dreary predictability of her Home Counties upbringing, Gray became, among other things, the first women’s page editor of the Observer; co-author of a bestselling cookery book (the 1957 Plats du Jour with Primrose Boyd); and, nearly 30 years later, sole author of a classic, the 1986 Honey from a Weed. She was also a jewellery maker; textile designer; student at the LSE, where one of her tutors was Hugh Gaitskell; an intrepid traveller; research assistant to H.F.K.

Philip Womack

Another gone girl

Adam Thorpe’s latest novel, Missing Fay, examines the lives of a disparate group of people in Lincolnshire, all touched in some way by the disappearance of the titular Fay, a sparky, gobby 14-year-old girl from a council estate. This is an England of motorways, dull campsites, immigrants and nursing homes: where transience is the norm, where those who sit still gently simmer. The landscapes and interiors are rendered with the delicate strokes of a painter, whether the bucolic tainted by sudden violence, the ancient streets of Lincoln, or the underpasses and playgrounds haunted by local youths. In contrast, played out on televisions in the background, are the Davos summit and the kinds of talent shows that promise instant fame.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Do we give a hoot?

‘There is room for a very interesting work,’ Gibbon observed in a footnote, ‘which should lay open the connection between the languages and manners of nations.’ The manners of the peoples of the United Kingdom and of the United States are very different, although not always in the way that received prejudices have it: any English visitor to America must be struck by how much politer most Americans are than the average run of his compatriots. But The American Language, as H.L. Mencken called his great book, has developed in a way that isn’t always dainty. It has a vigor and color of its own, and a rich vocabulary which has combined with the central advantages English already possessed.

David Crane

Blood and bling

There must be any number of self-respecting gemmologists out there on first-name terms with other diamonds, but for most of us the Koh-i-Noor is pretty well it. Most of what we think we know might be myth, guesswork or just plain wrong, and yet in spite of — or perhaps because of — that, the diamond which once adorned the Mughal empire’s Peacock Throne still retains all its old, ambiguous allure. If Anita Anand can trace her own fascination back to a childhood visit with her father to see the stone in the Tower of London, it is rather harder to see just what — other than ‘an ingenious agent’ — might have persuaded William Dalrymple to turn a ‘momentary jeu d’esprit’ into a full-blown book.

Thursday

Anna Aslanyan

Travelling hopefully

Olga Tokarczuk examines questions of travel in our increasingly interconnected and fast-moving world. The award-winning Polish writer channels her wanderlust into reflections upon the places she visits, sometimes in a handful of lines, sometimes in longer chapters, telling other people’s and her own stories. Her prose, however, is anything but conventional travel writing, and she is the first to point out the danger she would be in otherwise: ‘Describing something is like using it — it destroys.’ Trained as a psychologist, Tokarczuk is interested in what connects the human soul and body.

Johanna Thomas-Corr

Cries and whispers | 15 June 2017

There’s a moment in A Boy in Winter where a young Ukrainian policeman has to escort his town’s Jewish population to a churned-up field under the watchful eyes of his new Nazi masters. It’s November 1941 and Mykola has been told that all he has to do is relieve the Jews of their luggage and move them along. He assumes that they know what’s coming to them. In his mind, the Germans are ‘bastards’ but no worse than his former Soviet occupiers, who burned his family’s fields and grain stores as they fled eastwards. So Mykola has deserted the Red Army and joined the auxiliary police under the Germans, the only way to make a living in the occupied town.

Adrian Woolfson

Take heart

In this magnificent book, Thomas Morris provides us with a thoughtful, engaging and rigorous account of how cardiac surgeons through history have sought to undo the ravages wrought on the heart and its associated major blood vessels by abnormal genes, imperfect development, bacterial infections such as rheumatic fever, venereal diseases, unhealthy lifestyles and a host of other factors. He also offers an insight into the nature of scientific discovery, the mindsets of the characters driving it and the ever-present role of luck. It was, indeed, a simple mistake made in 1947 by a young researcher called Arthur Voorhees that led to a chance observation which resulted in the development of the first artificial grafts to replace damaged blood vessels.

Lewis Jones

Three for the road

One of the great challenges in life, writes Richard Ford in Between Them, ‘is to know our parents fully — assuming they survive long enough, are worth knowing and it is physically possible’. Leaving aside the question of whether we can ever know anyone fully, Ford’s knowledge of his parents, Parker and Edna, was limited. They did not survive long enough, or at least his father didn’t. Soon after Ford’s 16th birthday, his father ‘came awake in his bed on a Saturday morning and died’, aged 55, of a heart attack, as Richard administered CPR. Nor were they particularly worth knowing, whatever that means; his description of them as ‘country people and insufficiently educated’ gives some idea.

Helen R Brown

Hornet highballs anyone?

After school last Wednesday, I watched my five-year-old daughter pop a dead cricket on to her tongue and proclaim it: ‘Like fishy popcorn!’ ‘MMMm, delicious!’ squealed her friend, reaching for more as a third little girl spat hers, discreetly, back into her palm. ‘I’m getting pistachio,’ said the spitter’s mum, picking up the packet for closer scrutiny. I popped one into my own mouth and got stale, mealy, chewy: like a morsel of dusty, old crab-paste sandwich. I bought the edible Acheta domesticus at my local farm shop. They were stacked, like a drinking bet, above the local gins under a sign reading: ‘Sharing for the Daring.’ Mealworms with Sesame and Cumin; Grasshoppers with Paprika and Crickets with Sweet Mango.

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Sink or swim | 15 June 2017

I used to worry that I would never be a good writer because my childhood wasn’t interesting enough. I now think there must be some other explanation. Because the truth is that, when I was still pretty young, my parents banished me to an isolated community where for years on end I was compelled to dress in heritage costume, endure the uncanny absence of women and participate in ritualistic group activities, often of a physical or religious nature. That’s right. I am an Old Harrovian. On the face of it, this seems like an odd choice for my parents to have made for me — although it isn’t as bat-cave crazy as Alex Renton tries to suggest in Stiff Upper Lip, his rich, righteous diatribe against the public school system.

Christopher Hawtree

Sheen of authenticity

In 2006, after five decades, Shaun Greenhalgh lost his enthusiasm for the British Museum. From a very early age, he had been inspired by its contents to a profitable and diverse career in art forgery from his Bolton garden shed. A teenage talent for faking Victoriana had led him on to make an array of millennia-traversing art works, in all media, which he sold with the help of his ageing parents and which came to rest in eminent quarters both private and public. His work was taken by one American president to be that of the distinguished neoclassical sculptor Horatio Greenough. Others took him for Leonardo, Lowry, Gauguin, Moran or Hepworth. Among the few to acquire a genuine Greenhalgh was none other than Barbara Hepworth herself.

David Kynaston

Ever decreasing circles

‘The area’s isolation has given it a strong sense of community and independence,’ runs the Wikipedia entry on New Addington. The presence of the library, youth clubs, leisure centre, shops, churches and street market enables locals to lead full lives in many ways. The Addington Community Association has provided an important hub for the community. It has been notable for its local gangs. John Grindrod’s illuminating and enjoyable Outskirts is in part a memoir about growing up in New Addington, in part an intimate family history, and in part a history-cum-gazetteer of the green belt, along with a meditation on its uncertain future. My strong suspicion is that most Spectator readers, even if Londoners, barely know where New Addington is, let alone have been there.

Robert Carver

Nazis and the dark arts

When he came to power Hitler had a dowser scour the Reich Chancellery for cancerous ‘death rays’. Before flying to Scotland Rudolf Hess had his horoscope drawn up by a personal astrologer. Himmler backed research on the Holy Grail and medieval devil worship (‘Luciferism’) and sent an SS expedition by the explorer Dr Ernst Schafer to Tibet in 1938 to investigate the ancient Indo-German ‘Aryan’ origins of Buddhism. Himmler also founded the SS Witches Division, which collected evidence in eastern Europe in the second world war that Teutonic ‘wise women’ had been persecuted and burnt in a Jewish-Catholic Inquisition plot against volkisch German culture and blood.

Sofka Zinovieff

Sisters in scandal

In our age of elasticated leisurewear, ready meals and box sets on telly, it is exhilarating to read about people who would come down to dinner in peacock-feather head-dresses, swathed in large snakes and dripping ornamental chicken blood. The Marchesa Casati has a loyal cult following and her bizarre style still influences fashion designers; but by placing her alongside two sisters in scandal in this triple biography, Judith Mackrell has done something very clever and entertaining. The author, the Guardian’s dance critic, has already championed controversial women in her multiple biography Flappers and in Bloomsbury Ballerina, about Lydia Lopokova. Now she recounts the lives of three wildly ambitious yet vulnerable women with page-turning pace and intelligence.