More from Books

Tuesday

Leaf Arbuthnot

The childhood terrors of Judith Hermann

The German writer Judith Hermann burst on the literary scene in 1998 with her short story collection Summerhouse, Later, and was soon heralded as one of a new wave of Fräuleinwunder – girl wonders who were writing fiction that felt fresh and uninhibited. Now she has produced a memoir of sorts – in parts slyly moving, in others so stony-faced and self-serious as to border on the parodic. First the parodic. The book opens one night in Berlin with Hermann running into the psychotherapist she has been seeing three times a week for ten years. Over the course of these sessions, she recalls, she fell in love, then out of love, with him, though he hardly spoke to her at all. This encounter feels initially charged and full of promise, but it leads nowhere in particular.

David Abulafia

Round the world in a vast, unlovely barge

Ships change not just their location but their identity throughout their lives. Medieval trading vessels became warships at royal command. The Queen Mary was a troop ship during the second world war. Ian Kumekawa, of Harvard University, has had the clever idea of following a modern ship through its metamorphoses and asking how these changes in use reflect the economic conditions of our time. But this ship is no Queen Mary. He calls it the Vessel, because it changes its name and owner so many times. Without its superstructure, no one would give it a second glance. It has neither an engine nor a rudder. It had to be mounted on a heavy-lift ship or towed to reach it destination.

Susie Mesure

Amid the alien corn: Beautyland, by Marie-Helene Bertino

‘I am an Adina,’ the four-year-old protagonist of Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland writes to her extraterrestrial superiors on Planet Cricket Rice, which is light years away from Earth. ‘Yesterday I saw bunnies on the grass,’ she adds, using the fax machine her mother retrieved from their neighbour’s trash. ‘DESCRIBE BUNNIES,’ they respond, sparking a dialogue that continues well into her adulthood. Adina’s premature birth in September 1977 coincided with the departure of the Voyager 1 probe, which was launched with a phonograph record of sounds intended to explain human life to intelligent extra-terrestrials. The timing is significant because Adina was sent to Earth from Planet Cricket Rice to report on human life.

Ian Thomson

A psychopath on the loose: Never Flinch, by Stephen King, reviewed

Stephen King, 77, is a writer of towering brilliance whose fiction appeals to a reading public both popular and serious. His 60th novel, Never Flinch, unfolds in Buckeye City, Ohio, where a serial murderer is on the loose under the alias of Bill Wilson – the name of the man who co-founded Alcoholics Anonymous. Wilson has sworn to kill 14 people in revenge for the death of a friend and former alcoholic who was framed and convicted for child pornography offences. The plot is steeped in AA lore (‘Honesty in all our affairs’) and an awareness of the deleterious effects of drinking to excess. It’s no secret that King is himself a recovering alcoholic.

Helen Brown

My obsession with ageing rock stars – by Kate Mossman

‘The older male rock star isn’t just my specialist subject, it’s my obsession,’ admits Kate Mossman in the opening pages of Men of a Certain Age. Over the 15 years she’s spent interviewing ageing rockers such as Sting, Tom Jones, Ray Davies, Glen Campbell and Nick Cave for the Word and the New Statesman, she describes feeling ‘something inside of me ignite... so excited, yet so at ease’. ‘How is it,’ she asks, ‘that in the presence of a wrinkly rock star twice my age, I sometimes feel like I’m meeting... me?’ Having encountered my share of these guys myself, I know precisely what she means. Rock journalism is a field in which all the writers are fans, but, as Mossman notes, ‘part of the art is pretending not to be’.

Thursday

Frances Wilson

Richard Ellmann: the man and his masks

Richard Ellmann’s acclaimed life of James Joyce was published in 1959, with a revised and expanded edition appearing in 1982. The first edition, the work of an ambitious young American academic, received what Ellmann’s editor at Oxford University Press described as ‘the most ecstatic reaction I have seen to any book I have known anything about’. Ellmann’s work would ‘fix Joyce’s image for a generation’ wrote Frank Kermode in The Spectator, a prediction described by Zachary Leader as ‘if anything, too cautious’. By the time of the second edition, Ellmann had become a lionised Oxford don and the image of Joyce he had fixed was starting to chafe.

Mark Nayler

The problem with Pascal’s wager

Blaise Pascal resists definition. During a short life (he died in 1662, aged 39) he invented the calculator, laid the foundations for probability theory and created the first public transport system. He was also an austere Catholic, whose call for a return to strict Augustinian doctrines put him outside the religious mainstream. As a philosopher, he is remembered today for his ‘wager’ argument – a challenge to atheists, framed as a cosmic gamble. As Graham Tomlin shows in this lively, conversational biography, Pascal worked in threes, often steering a course between extremes.

Tuesday

Lee Langley

Consorting with the enemy: The Propagandist, by Cécile Desprairies, reviewed

As a young child in the mid-1960s, Cécile Desprairies listened hour after hour to her mother Lucie dreamily recalling the 1940s, dwelling on a past peopled by undefined heroes and ‘the bastards’ who murdered them. Names were rarely mentioned or hastily passed over. In the fashionable Paris apartment there were daily gatherings – her mother, aunt, cousin and grandmother twittering like birds, obsessed with fashion and cosmetics. Between trying on clothes, there was endless looking back at a lost golden age and lamenting the disasters that followed. Lucie was always in charge, her second husband Charles, Cécile’s father, casually excluded. There was gossip about acquaintances, women with Jewish names described as ‘wealthy’, all apparently orphaned.

Leyla Sanai

Private battles: Twelve Post-War Tales, by Graham Swift, reviewed

When Granta magazine’s list of Best of Young British Novelists first appeared in 1983 it was a cue for me to immerse myself in the work of the named writers. There was the dazzling sardonic humour and knowing intelligence of Martin Amis; Ian McEwan’s twisty psychological thrillers; the cool prose of Kazuo Ishiguro, masking latent pain; and the fantastical, rich threads of Salman Rushdie. Rose Tremain’s anthropological insights and Pat Barker’s harrowing war stories were also transfixing. It took me a while to get to Graham Swift, but when I read Waterland, Mothering Sunday and the Booker-winning Last Orders, I was quietly absorbed. Swift didn’t aim for the pyrotechnics of his literary brothers. If they were strutting peacocks in the aviary of new writers, he was a sparrow.

Julie Burchill

A David Bowie devotee with the air of Adrian Mole

When one thinks of ‘odd’, one might imagine the bizarre but not the boring. Yet odd thingscan indeed be boring – as Peter Carpenter’s book shows. First, a word about my admiration for David Bowie, which began when I was 12. He was a vastly gifted artist as well as being a supremely ambitious man, who once floated himself on the stock exchange and appeared in an ad for bottled water when already a millionaire many times over. He also had sex with children, helping himself to the virginity of a 13-year-old girl as part of the ‘Baby Groupies’ circle. I think of myself at 13. Would I have had sex with Bowie, given the chance? You bet! Do I think it was creepy he seduced 13-year-olds? Without a doubt. No such paradoxes are explored in the pedestrian plod that is Bowieland.

Alan Judd

From the early 1930s we knew what Hitler’s intentions were – so why were we so ill-prepared?

MI6’s historical archive suffered disastrous weeding on grounds of space from the 1920s onwards. One of many mysteries was the identity of a 1930s/40s agent referred to cryptically in surviving papers as ‘C’s German source’ (C being the chief of MI6). Now, as a result of indefatigable research, Tim Willasey-Wilsey has established who the man was who almost uniquely reported on the thinking of Hitler’s pre-war inner circle. In the course of this the author may also have resolved the origin of the notorious Zinoviev Letter, believed by many in the Labour party to have lost them the 1924 general election.   William Sylvester de Ropp, a baron usually known as Bill de Ropp, was a Lithuanian Balt, born in 1886.

Jude Cook

Driven to extremes: The Rest of Our Lives, by Ben Markovits, reviewed

In a break from his tetralogy about the Essinger family, and following on from The Sidekick (a kind of Humboldt’s Gift with basketball), Ben Markovits now takes us on a road trip across America. The Rest of Our Lives explores marital breakdown, betrayal, the empty nest and a myriad mid-life malaises, including life-threatening illness. It’s quietly enthralling and full of the small epiphanies that more maximalist writers wouldn’t deem worthy of notice. When Amy Lanyard has an affair with ‘a guy called Zach Zirsky whom she knew from synagogue’, her husband Tom, a legal professor, vows to leave the marriage after their daughter Miri turns 18.

Stephen Bayley

The mixed messages of today’s architecture – retro utopias or dizzy towers?

Only when history is decarbonised and decolonised will we understand how architecture should advance. For the time being, the art and science of building design are additionally hobbled by ‘systemic’ gender bias and ‘western-centric’ chauvinism.  If the dreary fugue of DEI rhetoric and the baffling clichés of archispeak make you want to scream, this book may not be for you. But get beyond the annoying tone – which combines dire waffle with apocalyptic prophecy – and Owen Hopkins has an important subject. The ‘Manifesto House’, he tells us, is evidence of a ‘deep and all-encompassing vision’ enjoyed by its designers. And these visions project themselves into the future, the place we are all going to live.

Marina O’Loughlin

Keith McNally: ‘Still craving the success I pretend to despise’

Any of the sizeable audience that the restaurateur Keith McNally – of Balthazar, Minetta Tavern and Pastis fame – has accumulated on Instagram will recognise his appetite for beef. His followers find his attacks on people from James Corden to Michael Palin equally delicious. He tried it with me, too, and launched a series of salvos, despite my admiration of his early game-changing NYC restaurants. Not only was I a corrupt food critic, I was comparable to Boris Johnson and Vladimir Putin. So the idea of reviewing his memoir was clearly tempting – revenge served cold kinda thing. But McNally’s very first sentence outlines his plans to kill himself in the aftermath of a particularly dehumanising stroke. Oh.

Thursday

Maggie Fergusson

It’s trust in English kindness that keeps the migrants coming

Halfway through The Shawshank Redemption, Andy and Red, sitting in their filthy prison yard, discuss hope. Red thinks it’s a dangerous thing, which can lead to despair if not fulfilled. But Andy insists on hoping for freedom, and his hope is finally rewarded. The astonishing thing about the migrants and refugees Horatio Clare meets in this short, powerful book – Sudanese, Afghans, Iraqis, Iranians, Ethiopians, Pakistanis, Moroccans, Syrians and Yemenis in Dover, Calais, Falmouth and Portland – is that, despite being some of the most helpless and vulnerable people in the world, most have not lost hope. In Calais’s fenced and guarded camps, the soundtrack is laughter.

Tuesday

Suzi Feay

The grooming of teenaged Linn Ullmann

Girl, 1983, a fusion of novel and memoir, tantalises with what we already know of its author. Linn Ullmann is the daughter of the Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann and the much older Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman. Their relationship was probed in her previous work, Unquiet. Here the parents are more distant figures, as the adult Linn attempts to reconstruct her headstrong 16-year-old self and recover a disturbing interlude spent in Paris as a would-be model. In 2019, Ullmann is struggling to write when her younger self materialises like an imaginary friend with a message that demands to be heard. Ullmann has a daughter now, which makes the quest to understand the events of decades ago all the more urgent.

Clemmie Read

It’s a wonder that the Parthenon remains standing at all

We all have our own vision of the Parthenon. Lord Elgin, for one, seems to have treated it like Harrods. Hoping to decorate his Scottish stately home with the Marbles, he wrote long instructions to his agent: ‘The first on the list are the metopes, the bas-reliefs and the remains of the statues... Would it be permissible to speak of a Caryatid?’ The Greek gods must have thought not, because Elgin’s fortunes rapidly took a turn for the worse. He lost some of the Marbles in a shipwreck in 1802; was imprisoned in a French fortress by Napoleon; his wife had an affair with his best friend; and he lost his entire fortune in the ensuing divorce. He returned to England penniless, dreams of interior design long abandoned. And that, believe it or not, is when the drama really began.

Boyd Tonkin

News from a small island: Theft, by Abdulrazak Gurnah, reviewed

In 2021, the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature made Abdulrazak Gurnah the world’s second-best-known Zanzibari – after a certain Farrokh Bulsara, aka Freddie Mercury. Forgive the flippant comparison, but the pop world’s perplexity over Queen’s vocalist’s origins feels germane to the quest for a coherent self and story undertaken by the Nobel laureate’s chief characters. Born in 1948, in what was still the ancient, British-protected sultanate of Zanzibar, Gurnah has, over 11 novels, done more than explore ‘the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents’ (as the Nobel citation primly put it). His fiction shows that the shocks of power and history can make an exile of anyone, even in our home and in our skin.

Leyla Sanai

Who’s the muse? In a Deep Blue Hour, by Peter Stamm, reviewed

The Swiss writer Peter Stamm’s fiction is often enigmatic – unreliable narrators, contradictory behaviour and characters who can’t admit to their emotions. In his latest novel, fortysomething Andrea is in Paris with her cameraman boyfriend Tom, attempting to make a documentary about a celebrated author 20 years older than herself. The subject, Richard Wechsler, appears to like Andrea, but isn’t enthusiastic about the film. His novels generally feature a muse to whom the male character frequently returns, and Andrea becomes obsessed with discovering if this relates to Wechsler’s life. At the same time, she is annoyed if Tom asks Wechsler similar personal questions. (Andrea is easily irritated, ending several relationships when none of them lives up to her exacting standards.

James Bradley

What sea slugs can teach us about organ transplants

While they may be outnumbered and outweighed by insects, the terrestrial world is really the kingdom of the vertebrates. Mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians dominate most ecosystems. Yet, as Drew Harvell points out in her fascinating new book, the seeming diversity of the terrestrial vertebrates is deceptive. In fact all are contained within just one of the 34 groups of animals that live on our planet, and their many designs are really variations on a quite narrow set of themes. This means that all share bilateral symmetry – heads with eyes and brains atop bodies with four limbs that contain their organs. By contrast, the other 33 groups of animals, the invertebrates, are astonishingly various in their design, with arsenals of adaptations and biological tricks.