More from Books

Thursday

Anthony Cummins

Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Ghana Must Go, by Taiye Selasi – review

Excitement over the extraterritorial birthplace of authors on Granta’s recent list of Britain’s best young novelists must have been old news in the United States, where the New Yorker’s equivalent exercise four years ago turned up Americans from China, the Dominican Republic, Ethiopia, Latvia, Nigeria, Peru, Russia and Serbia. Roughly speaking, this immigrant fiction makes a threefold appeal: it’s exotic, yet familiar (‘our’ culture measured by the standards of another), with a hairshirt’s prickle, too (by showing how short we fall). Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s new novel briefly features an eight-year-old Pennsylvanian boy who, before his nanny arrived from Nigeria, never knew that oranges contained pips.

Lewis Jones

Eleven Days in August, by Matthew Cobb – review

It is fair to assume that Professor Matthew Cobb has often been asked if he is related to Professor Richard Cobb since he begins the acknowledgements of his new book by announcing that he is not. Richard Cobb wrote books about France — where he was known as l’étonnant Cobb and, according to his obituary in the Independent, ‘once greeted the dawn nude, in the company of a dozen similarly unattired men and women, in the fountains of the Place de la Concorde’ — and he had a son called Matthew; and Matthew Cobb’s father was called Richard, so the question is understandable. It must also be annoying, though, because Richard Cobb was such a stylish writer, while Matthew Cobb is less so.

Andro Linklater

Life and Letters, by Allan Massie – review

It is a safe bet that Alex Salmond has no immediate plans to embrace Allan Massie as one of Scotland’s National Treasures. A Unionist in an increasingly nationalist country, a traditionalist in a time of change, an ungoogler engulfed by the internet, and an amateur of creative activities, cultural and sporting, when the fashion is for professional analysis, Massie could hardly be more out of step with the prevailing ethos of his countrymen. Yet, this collection of his Life & Letters columns for The Spectator illustrates why the larger community of readers and writers should clasp him to their collective bosom as a figure of genuine literary distinction.

Philip Ziegler

Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, by Charles Moore, and Not for Turning, by Robin Harris – review

It is a measure of Lady Thatcher’s standing that her death has been followed not only by the mealy-mouthed compliments from political opponents which are normally forthcoming on such occasions but also by robust denunciations. Nobody would have sung ‘Ding, dong, the Wizard is dead!’ after the deaths of Jim Callaghan, John Major or Alec Douglas-Home. Even the more controversial Harold Wilson got a bland send-off in his obituaries. Ted Heath was asked by a journalist whether it was true that, when he heard of Margaret Thatcher’s eviction from the party leadership, he had exclaimed ‘Rejoice! Rejoice!’. No, he replied, after some deliberation. ‘What I said was “Rejoice! Rejoice! Rejoice!

Rachel Redford

The Spoken Word: Short Stories, Volume II – review

Largely unheard since their original performances or BBC broadcasts between 1939 and 2011, these readings of 12 short stories by their authors are a treasure trove. * E.M.Forster’s 1948 reading definitely conjures up a past era. His philosophical debate in ‘Mr Andrews’ concerning two souls in ‘interspace’ — of a righteous Englishman and a Turk who has slain his enemy ‘whilst fighting the infidel’ — is as academic as the 70-year-old author’s voice. Similarly the irresistible opening to Osbert Sitwell’s ‘The Staggered Stay’ immediately takes us back to the Forties: ‘Miss Mumsford always put her aunt away upstairs, even in summer, before she came down to dinner...

Thursday

Caroline Jackson

‘The Politics of Washing: Real Life in Venice’, by Polly Coles – review

Master your disappointment. The Politics of Washing: Real Life in Venice (Hale, £9.99) is as far from the fantasy-relocation genre of hapless writer transposed to sunny European idyll with cast of gurning locals and comic anecdotes involving insects as Prospero’s unnamed island was from Stratford. Mercifully, Polly Coles stuck to a year’s tenancy; she and her Italian husband were gainfully employed, her children are normal and she can write, fantastically well. Having a lot of baggage in Venice isn’t great — it trips you up, impedes your enjoyment and sours your reception as you lug and lumber. Coles clearly has ample knowledge but also the wit to have travelled light.

Richard Davenporthines

‘Death in the Baltic: The World War II Sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff’, by Cathryn J. Prince – review

Wilhelm Gustloff was a Nazi leader in Switzerland, who was shot dead in his Davos apartment by a Croatian Jewish medical student in 1936. Hitler at the ensuing state funeral promised that Gustloff would remain ‘immortal’ under the Third Reich. But his name is now only remembered because it was bestowed on a ship which later sank with the highest loss of life in maritime history. The torpedoing of the Wilhelm Gustloff in the Baltic in 1945 took an estimated 9,400 lives. This is double the number who perished with the Doña Paz in the Philippines in 1987, and far outstrips the 1,523 lost on Titanic in 1912.

N. S.

After War

‘The Firs’, ‘Hillcrest’, ‘Innisfree’ I An aerial view. A brochure maps it out And full possession guaranteed Within the year: time for the prefab plots to sprout Before the moves and backyards turn to seed. II Look, engines pushing upwards, shovels plough Until the hill is taken, then a kerb Whitewashed, colonial style, now caps the brow Once held by rosebay willow herb. III From smoke-black stations, city veterans Ascend and, armed with suitcases, meet packed Possessions dropped by green removal vans To walls in plaster, pale and cracked. IV But after decoration, ground is gained: Slit trenches, dug in by skeletal frames, Hold nothing but the memories retained By varnished pokerwork to post the names.

Clare Mulley

‘Cruel Crossing: Escaping Hitler Across the Pyrenees’, by Edward Stourton – review

‘One afternoon in September 1942,’ Edward Stourton opens this important and rewarding book, ‘a young man and a young woman could be seen sitting on the back steps of a farmhouse in south west France, looking up at the Pyrenees.’ It is like the first image in an album packed with snapshots set against this same glorious setting. ‘There is no neat way of telling this piece of history’, Stourton concedes; ‘it is a jumble of individual lives’. Collectively these brief glimpses tell the story of the perilous passages over the mountains between France and Spain during the second world war.

Mark Fisher

‘A is a Critic: Writings from The Spectator’, by Andrew Lambirth – review

The following novel re-assessment is typical of Andrew Lambirth: Although Eileen Agar exhibited with Miro, Magritte and Ernst, she was never a ‘card-carrying surrealist’. The origins of her work were rooted in ‘the great English Romantic tradition’ — medieval illumination, William Blake, Edward Lear. Lambirth approaches painters and paintings not through the prism of current fashion but in the light of his extensive knowledge and through looking, intently and without prejudice. It is what makes his weekly judgments in The Spectator always refreshing and his writing unlike that of any other critic since David Sylvester.

John Preston

‘Kurt Vonnegut Letters’, by Dan Wakefield – review

In the early 1950s Kurt Vonnegut became the manager of a Saab dealership in Cape Cod, a job which often involved him taking prospective clients out on test drives. Keen to demonstrate the Saab’s front-wheel drive, Vonnegut would take corners at a tremendous lick, leaving his often elderly passengers ‘sickly and green’ afterwards. Vonnegut’s early writings left a number of editors feeling pretty sickly and green too. As the rejection slips piled up, he cast around desperately for some alternative source of income. He tried to flog a board-game he’d invented, as well as a bowtie made from ribbon the Atomic Energy Commission used to cordon off highly radioactive areas which he was convinced would prove a big hit.

Benjamin Yardebuller

‘Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov’, edited by Robert Chandler – review

For the English-speaking world, the book that more than any other defines the magic — or fairy — tale is Children’s and Household Tales by Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, first published in Germany in 1812, and translated (or adapted: it was seriously toned down) into English by Edgar Taylor in 1823. For the Grimms, as for other Romantic writers, these traditional tales were the repository of an authentic, national culture, under dual threat from industrialisation and invasion by Napoleon’s France. Educated Russian interest in folk traditions followed a similar trajectory: the first great Russian folklorist, Aleksandr Afanasyev, assembled his vast collection in the middle years of the 19th century.

Wynn Wheldon

‘Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls’, by David Sedaris – review

David Sedaris writes principally for The New Yorker. Urbane, then, American, smart. But is he a memoirist, a fabulist or an essayist? He is most often described as a humorist, but he’s not funny like, say, Woody Allen. He’s no Stephen Leacock. The aim of his writing is not to make the reader laugh. Which is not to say that there isn’t at least a chuckle or two and usually a guffaw in each of the 26 pieces that comprise this book. While studying Life in the UK in order to apply for Indefinite Leave to stay here, Sedaris learns much that the rest of us do not know: ‘I learned that people below the age of 16 cannot deliver milk in the UK, but I don’t think I learned why. It was just one of those weird English injustices.

Peter J. Conradi

‘Imagined Greetings: Poetic Engagements with R.S. Thomas’, by David Lloyd – review

There is a much reproduced image of the great Welsh poet R.S. Thomas towards the end of his life. A gaunt and angular figure leans defiantly out over the half-gate of his cottage on the Llyn peninsula, wild of hair, curmudgeonly and altogether unwelcoming. The photograph, taken after Thomas’s retirement as vicar of the fishing village of Aberdaron and relocation to nearby Rhiw, reveals a man at war with the world — and with himself too. Tourists passing through the Welsh-speaking region who asked him for directions encountered the baffling response: ‘No English’. He would return indoors to relish the joke with his monoglot English wife Elsi. She shared his hatred of the machine age.

John Greening

Provincials

for Stuart Henson So Petrarch lived here? First saw Laura here, invented the sonnet and began a craze that turned to ‘tyranny’ (your word). These days they’re hardly de rigueur, but there’s the fear that if you can’t balance seven hundred years on fourteen lines and five rhymes, then the Muse will leave for Tony Harrison. There she goes. But you and I have learned by now to steer a steady course up Petrarch’s mountain track or — better metaphor — across the Rhône beside that Pont that keeps on reaching for a rhyme on its far bank. We know the knack of picking a wind, too: not one that’s blown infernos; one that gently tries the door.

Owen Bennett-Jones

‘Ask Forgiveness Not Permission’, by Howard Leedham – review

At the start of 2004 Howard Leedham, a former British special forces officer who had taken up US citizenship, addressed the raw Pashtun recruits he had made into a US-backed militia capable of operating on the Pakistan-Afghan border, surely one of the world’s most hostile environments. He told them about Lawrence of Arabia’s famous cross-desert assault on the port of Aqabar: ‘We are like Lawrence of Arabia,’ he said.‘Now let’s find our Aqabar.’ You might think that the US military high command would have identified a target before deploying a military force to attack it. But in the aftermath of 9/11 the normal rules did not apply.

Thursday

Rupert Christiansen

Bookends: Byronic intensity

A year before he died from emphysema in 1990, the composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein agreed to be interviewed by the music journalist Jonathan Cott for Rolling Stone. Dinner with Lenny (OUP, £16.99) is the transcription of their 12-hour conversation, in which Bernstein’s frenetic energy —  ‘Byronic intensity’ is how Cott puts it  — is as vividly evident as his relentless egocentricity and unctuous if irresistible charm.

Victoria Glendinning

‘Trespassers: A Memoir’, by Julia O¹Faolain

In this memoir Julia O’Faolain, author of seven distinguished novels and many short stories, asserts that she has nothing to say about the ‘inner Julia’, because being a writer she is more interested in observing other people. And, importantly, ‘I write because Seán and Eileen did.’ Some women stop identifying themselves as their parents’ daughter when they leave home. Julia O’Faolain certainly left home geographically. Over a long life she has lived in London, Dublin, Rome, Florence, Paris, Los Angeles, Portland, New York and Venice. Yet on the evidence of this succinct memoir, she remains the daughter.

Geoffrey Owen

‘The Branded Gentry’, by Charles Vallance and David Hopper

We care because our name’s on it. This was the slogan used by Warburtons, the family-owned bakery company, to set itself apart from its rivals, most of which had impersonal names like Premier Foods or Allied Bakeries. Is this just a marketing ploy, or do people actually prefer to buy from a company that has the same name as the person who owns and runs it? The answer is not obvious. Entrepreneurs often choose to use an invented brand name rather than their own. Branson Atlantic sounds less inviting than Virgin Atlantic, and Apple might not be the company that it is today if it had followed the example of its Silicon Valley predecessor, Hewlett Packard, and called itself Jobs Wozniak, after the two founders.

Philip Hensher

‘Best of Young British Novelists 4’, by John Freeman (ed)

The literary magazine Granta had the bright idea, in 1983, of promoting 20 British novelists under 40 by announcing that they were the ‘best’ around. The first list was a resounding success, taking Granta well out of its habitual mode by featuring some very un-Granta names, like Adam Mars-Jones and A.N.Wilson. Of course, there were some novelists there that anyone could have spotted at the time, such as Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan and Martin Amis, but the judges also impressively noticed Kazuo Ishiguro after a single book and Rose Tremain long before she substantially justified it. Ten years later, the exercise was repeated, with another brilliant group including A.L.Kennedy, Louis de Bernières and Alan Hollinghurst, and ten years after that too.