More from Books

Thursday

Jonathan Mirsky

Untold tales of Tibet

On the night of 17 March 1959, the 14th Dalai Lama, aged 23, slipped out of the Norbulinka, his summer residence in Lhasa, and began his flight to India, where he arrived on 31 March, after crossing some of Tibet’s most rugged terrain. He was so heavily disguised that the faithful crowds who had gathered to worship and protect him along the way mistakenly prostrated themselves before a monk in his entourage. Establishing in Dharamsala Tibet’s first democratically elected government, the Dalai Lama has ever since travelled the world making clear how the Chinese occupiers — who invaded Tibet in 1950 — eviscerated the country’s traditional culture.

Elisa Segrave

Body and soul

Emma Donoghue’s novel Room was short-listed for the 2010 Man Booker prize and made into a film in 2015. Inspired by Josef Fritzel’s incarceration of his daughter Elisabeth, it described a mother and son held captive in one room for several years. It depicted their intense, private world and focused on maternal love. The Wonder also inhabits a small, claustrophobic space, whose inhabitants cling to idiosyncratic rules and beliefs. Set in the Irish Midlands soon after the potato famine, the story shows the reliance of the poor and often starving on a mostly joyless and self-punishing Catholicism. The Wonder, as Room did, depicts maternal love, this time distorted, but no less intense.

Adam Nicolson

Perils of the Pacific

In the great Iberian empires of the 16th and 17th centuries, a career was already avail-able in global administration not very different from the lives of the bankers or lawyers who globe-trot today. In 1509, as one example among hundreds, Duarte Coelho Pereira, a soldier for the Portuguese crown in Morocco and West Africa, went to India, where he spent the next 20 years accompanying missions to China, Vietnam and Siam. Back in Portugal, he became ambassador to the French court and then commander of a patrol on the Malaga coast before taking up the captaincy of Pernambuco in northeast Brazil, a plum royal job, where he made his fortune and founded a dynasty.

Claire Lowdon

The curse of Mr Kurtz

Marie Darrieussecq shot to literary fame in France when her bestselling debut, Pig Tales (1996), was a finalist for the Prix Goncourt. Featuring a woman who turns into a pig, the novel earned Darrieussecq a reputation as a surrealist writer in the tradition of Kafka, and many of her subsequent works have involved fantastical elements and a dreamy, drifting prose style. Her two most recent novels, however, are rooted in the real, and narrated in a crisp, clear, present tense. Translated by Penny Hueston, both All The Way (2010) and her new book, Men, are about the same woman, Solange. All the Way was shot in close-up, focussing on the minutiae of Solange’s sexed-up adolescence in small-town France. In Men, the camera never leaves the boom.

Thursday

Eva Hoffman

Thinking of Israel

‘Here is a story from the winter days of the end of 1959 and the beginning of 1960,’ announces the opening sentence of Amos Oz’s challenging, complex and strangely compelling new novel. The story itself is easily summarised. At its centre is Shmuel Ash, a rather woebegone young man who abandons his university studies in Jerusalem when his girlfriend leaves him and his father withdraws his financial support.

Alex Clark

When less is more

It’s 2008 in Manhattan, and there’s still a brief window for the Goldman bankers to swill their ’82 Petrus before the crash, for the masters of the universe and social X-rays first sighted in Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities to launch another hostile takeover or push a lettuce leaf around a $25,000-a-table benefit dinner-plate. For Russell Calloway, encountered here for the third time, following previous outings in the novels Brightness Falls and The Good Life, such decadence is both revolting and alluring: as a struggling independent publisher, he is committed to the survival of bohemianism and the life of the mind; as a bon viveur, oenophile and gourmand, he’s made his peace with sniffing round the rich men’s tables.

Minoo Dinshaw

The Crusades live

The 12th-century crusader Reynald de Chatillon was one of the most controversial men of his time, and his new biographer Jeffrey Lee believes he has returned to disturbing relevance in ours. Over a relatively long life with a dramatically violent end, Reynald became Prince of Antioch by marriage, endured 16 years in a dungeon below Aleppo, attempted (uniquely in Islamic history) to raid Mecca and Medina, overturned the politics of the Crusader states, and became the bitterest enemy of Saladin. Reynald probably could not read or write, but had he tried his bloodstained hand at Blairesque apologetic memoir, the result might well have resembled Lee’s book. Like Reynald, Lee possesses a memorable style, flashy and crass by turns.

Daniel Hahn

Who you think you are

The Good Immigrant, a collection of essays about black and ethnic minority experience and identity in Britain today, is inconsistent, infuriating, uncomfortable and just occasionally insulting. It is also right to be every one of those things, and highly recommended. Its editor, Nikesh Shukla, was prompted to compile the book by an online comment on a Guardian article; but what really prompted it, of course, wasn’t just one commenter’s assumption but the society that the comment epitomises: a society in which immigrants are welcome, but only under certain conditions. That they are the right kind of immigrant, that minorities dutifully and above all gratefully play the role assigned to them.

Philip Collins

The quiet patriot

History teaches no lessons but we insist on trying to learn from it. There is no political party more sentimental than the Labour party. The stone monument of Labour history is Clement Attlee’s 1945–51 administration, so any biography of the great man is, inevitably, an intervention into the present state of the party, even if it comes supported with all the best scholarly apparatus. The last major biography of Attlee was Kenneth Harris’s official work, more than 30 years ago, in 1982. There is a neat symmetry to the fact that Harris was writing during the last occasion that the Labour party decided to join hands and walk off a cliff.

Elif Shafak

What makes Turkey tick

I remember an American author once saying she wrote about love and friendship because, after all, these were the fundamental things that people talked about when they gathered around dinner tables. Not quite so in Turkey. Over lengthy breakfasts and suppers, lunches and drinks, we Turks tend to talk about something else: politics. The truth is, we cannot get enough of politics. Even though politics dampens our spirits and darkens our minds, we return to the subject, like moths to their flames. Politics is a fast-running hare: we chase it as fast as our legs can possibly carry us, never quite managing to get hold of it. Everything happens too fast in Turkey. From one week to the next the mood alters. Yesterday’s heroes become tomorrow’s betrayers, and then suddenly, vice versa.

Wynn Wheldon

My mother, my self

To tell this story of his search for a mother lost to mystery in early infancy, its author uses the techniques of documentary drama. He describes past scenes and conversations in extreme, atmospheric detail: a particular dream on a particular night in the 1940s, a conversation in the 1950s. Perhaps his work as a screenwriter has helped in this, but it is the clarity of his prose and the emotional significance of his search that ensure an entirely plausible imaginative reconstruction. As one would in reviewing a novel, the characters may be described in the present tense.

Eric Weinberger

In a gun country

Picking a day at random, ‘an unremarkable Saturday in America’, the Guardian journalist Gary Younge identified ten children and teenagers throughout the United States who were shot dead on 23 November 2013. Whichever day he chose, he knew it would be typical. Determined to investigate each of these deaths, none of which bore much — or any — press coverage even locally, Younge would pore over the internet, visit grim parts of cities far from his Chicago home, locate as many relatives, friends and witnesses as he could and speak to them. His book, Another Day in the Death of America, is as one would imagine it: sad and bleak, an altogether terrible tale. Hopeless, too: no one, certainly not Younge, is under any illusion that this story will get better.

Thursday

Ariane Sherine

One long moanfest

Tama Janowitz’s memoir is a relentlessly cheerless and bitter collection of vignettes. Between tales of her purportedly miserly, creepy and emotionally manipulative father, who suggests that Janowitz enter a wet T-shirt contest aged 15, and her estranged and vicious brother, who tries to sue her despite he being rich and her virtually penniless, the Janowitz clan are portrayed as singularly defective. Struggling to care for her mother, who suffers from dementia (‘My mother is lying on her side with her diapers full of shit’), and fretting about her own teenage daughter, who regularly smokes marijuana, Janowitz is convinced that Tolstoy is wrong and no family is truly happy — though in fairness, she seems determined to fail to embrace happiness at all costs.

Caroline Moorehead

Twists and turns of the Italian campaign

When Rome fell to the Allies on 5 June 1944 General Harold Alexander, commander of the 15th Army, calculated that he would need just 12 weeks to reach the river Po and liberate Italy from the Germans. It took him nearly a year. Christian Jennings’s new book chronicles the months of heavy fighting, the advances and retreats and the enormous losses on both sides as the Allied forces stalled, and the enemy attacked. It was never going to be easy. Once the Italians signed the armistice with the Allies on 8 September 1943, turning their backs on their former Axis partners, the Germans moved quickly to occupy the whole of Italy. While the British and the Americans were arguing over their policy towards the defeated Italians, Hitler dispatched nine divisions down through the Brenner Pass.

Andrew Watts

Too, too shy-making

You might have thought that the last thing shy people need is a book about shyness: a large part of what makes us shy is our self-preoccupation and awareness of our own shyness. No social situation is more embarrassing — too, too shy-making — than someone pointing out we are shy: as if we didn’t know, as if that would help, as if, somehow, an increased consciousness of our self-consciousness would make us less self-conscious. Moreover, being away from home, I had to read this book in public — I removed the dust cover, of course, so no one could see what I was reading or be tempted to ask a question — in a succession of coffee shops. (I had to leave the first one when a stranger sat at an adjacent seat at the same table.

John R. MacArthur

The power of the American oligarchs

Talk about plutocracy and oligarchy has become commonplace in America, as the billionaire class grows ever richer and seemingly more arrogant. But do today’s super-rich constitute a threat to American democracy? Jane Mayer thinks they do, particularly when their money is employed by fanatics like Charles and David Koch and other like-minded tycoons to upend the social order. In Dark Money, Mayer describes a sophisticated right-wing political movement, largely operating through individual proxies and front groups, that seeks a kind of coup d’état, albeit one with libertarian objectives designed to reduce the power of the state as opposed to seizing it. So secretive and centrally organised is this reactionary cabal that it invites comparisons with the Marxist left.

Sebastian Faulks

A rose between two thorns

Emma Rauschenbach was the daughter of rich Swiss industrialists — a plump, good-natured girl, nicknamed ‘Sunny’, who married young without knowing what she was letting herself in for. Her husband, Carl Gustav Jung, was revered after his death as a guru as much as a doctor — as the mystic and visionary that Freud might have become had he not been so fixated on the role of the libido. As a husband, a father and a younger man, however, Jung appears to have been close to intolerable. He was physically large, selfish, bullying and loud of voice; he cheated at games, had a vile temper and appalling table manners; he thought men should be polygamous but that Emma should be his alone.

Jan Morris

Exquisite mementoes

All alone on page 313 of this spectacular book, a tattered but heroic flag flies in a painting of an icy wasteland. It is a remarkable picture for two reasons: first, because it was done by the Arctic explorer Edmund Wilson in 1912, when he and Captain Scott learnt from that very flag that the Norwegian Amundsen had reached the South Pole before them; and second, because it is a hauntingly beautiful work of art.

Ben Hamilton

The trouble with actors

A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, Eimear McBride’s acclaimed, prize-winning debut, felt like a one-off, not the beginning of a career. Its prose style — a staccato, Beckettian rush — was a good match for the subject of burgeoning womanhood amid grief and exploitation. But it was also very intense — so much so that before the novel’s end the language started to break apart, as if McBride had, with her very first book, reached beyond the limits of her voice. Yet here we are with a second novel and another young female Irish narrator with an unconventional syntax. This narrator (unnamed, like all the characters, until late in the novel) has escaped her family and moved to London to attend drama school.

Paul Levy

Hoarder disorder

The enormous desk on which I am writing this is swamped by four precarious piles of books, one topped by an ancient Filofax, another by a small framed photograph of a long-dead friend. I still bear the bruises from last week when I fell out of bed and triggered an avalanche of the book mountain on the bedside table, with its cache of notebooks, pens, pencils, water carafe and three reading lamps, one of which has been without a bulb for three months. I don’t actually know where anything is, and have to ask my wife if I need to find a particular title. Barry Yourgrau understands my inability to tidy up my study and my life. In Mess, he tries to clarify the differences between collectors (as we neurotics would like to pretend we are), clutterers and ‘extreme hoarders’.