More from Books

Tuesday

Nicholas Lezard

The next best thing to visiting a really clever friend in New York

I was on the phone to a friend recently, who asked me what I was reviewing. ‘It’s a book by a lady intellectual,’ I began. ‘Oh my God,’ she said, ‘I hope you don’t put that in your review.’ ‘I’m not that stupid,’ I replied, ‘but it is very important that she’s a woman.’ A self-described radical feminist in the 1960s and 1970s, Vivian Gornick says that that flame has died down a bit now (she was 79 when this book was first published ten years ago). Her perspective in this meandering, delightful memoir-cum-essay is still, obviously, feminine – yet there is a kind of detachment; and from what she says about her past life, and her experiences with men, and with love, there always was, in a way. Hence the ‘odd’ in the title.

Mitchell Reiss

Time is running out to tackle the dangers posed by AI

Is this what it felt like in the months before August 1914? Or during the years leading up to September 1939? The discussion around artificial intelligence produces a deep foreboding that we are in the grip of forces largely beyond our control. Are we sleepwalking towards disaster? That is the feeling I have after reading Genesis, a collaboration by Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, Craig Mundie, the former chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft, and Henry Kissinger, who died, aged 100, soon after completing this book. They have crafted a holistic analysis of the social, political, psychological and even spiritual impacts that a superior machine intelligence would have for humanity.  We are broadly familiar with AI’s current and future benefits.

Anne Margaret Daniel

The golden days of Greenwich Village

This multitudinous chronicle is not the story of the folk music revival. Rather, it’s not only the story of the folk scene in Greenwich Village from the late 1950s through the early 1980s. Ambitiously, sometimes overwhelmingly, but always fascinatingly, David Browne – a senior editor at Rolling Stone – composes his book of interconnected stories stemming from jazz, blues, folk, folk-rock and all the complementing, competing musical genres that could define what’s been played in the basement nightclubs and coffee houses in this small area of New York City since the early 20th century. He takes his title from the talkin’ blues, the direct ancestor of rap, and he is, like the writers of those blues, a born storyteller.

Tibor Fischer

The horror of Hungary in the second world war

I suspect Adam LeBor and his publishers must have struggled to come up with the title The Last Days of Budapest: Spies, Nazis, Rescuers and Resistance, 1940-1945. The book certainly does what it says on the cover, but its pages contain other Magyar-themed subjects. We are offered a wide-ranging reflection on Hungary in the first half of the 20th century, from the harsh measures of the 1920 Trianon treaty to the devastating arrival of the Soviet army in Budapest in 1944. LeBor switches between an Olympian view of European geopolitics, trawling diplomatic archives and political memoirs and focusing on individuals – Hungarian aristocrats, Zionists and nightclub singers – to show how history felt on the ground. He is particularly concerned with the fate of Hungarian Jewry.

Andrew Rosenheim

A mole in the CIA: The Seventh Floor, by David McCloskey, reviewed

David McCloskey, whose Damascus Station was a brilliant debut, has followed it in quick succession with a Russian-based story, Moscow X, and now The Seventh Floor. The pace of all three books is matched by the speed with which they have been produced; and for all The Seventh Floor’s strengths,the haste is beginning to show. Like the earlier two thrillers, it starts with a bang – or rather a crunch, when a Russian spy, called home peremptorily from Greece by his superiors, bites into a disguised cyanide capsule before the State security apparatus can question him. Almost simultaneously, another Russian spook, named Golikov, has a clandestine meeting in Singapore with Sam Joseph, a CIA officer known to us from Moscow X.

Thursday

Ian Thomson

Norman Lewis – a restless adventurer with a passion for broken-down places

The travel writer Norman Lewis, the son of a Welsh psychic medium, died in Essex in 2003 at the age of 94. In his darkly comic autobiography, Jackdaw Cake, he relates how, in 1937, his mother built a spiritualist church in the north London suburb of Enfield as a sort of Taj Mahal memorial to her late husband (who was a retail pharmacist as well as a psychic). Enfield is not a likely pocket of the paranormal, but the Enfield Beacon of Light is still going strong. During its table-rapping and other spook-dabbling sessions no one is allowed to make jokes about striking a happy medium. Spiritualism is dead serious. Lewis’s humdrum upbringing in Edwardian Enfield – aspidistras, astral-planing – was far removed from the social privilege of most literary travellers.

Mia Levitin

Bad vibrations: Lazarus Man, by Richard Price, reviewed

Richard Price’s tenth novel follows four characters in the wake of a tenement building collapse in Harlem that kills six people and leaves others missing. Detective Mary Roe is on a mission to find a missing resident whose wife was among the dead. Royal Davis is a funeral home director hoping to drum up much-needed business from the tragedy, going so far as to dispatch his young son to hand out business cards at the site. Felix Pearl is a freelance photographer searching for meaning as he documents the aftermath. The titular resurrected man is Anthony Carter, a 42-year-old former schoolteacher, six months clean of a cocaine addiction that has cost him his job and relationship with his wife and stepdaughter.

Francesca Peacock

Outlandish epic: Lies and Sorcery, by Elsa Morante, reviewed

In 1948, Natalia Ginzburg, then an editor at the Italian publishing house Einaudi, received an 800-page brick of a manuscript from an acquaintance, Elsa Morante. Ginzburg read it in one sitting and declared Morante was going to be ‘the greatest writer of the century’. More recently, Elena Ferrante credited Morante with showing her ‘what literature can be’. The book that produced such praise – Italo Calvino called it ‘a serious novel, full of living human beings’ – has gone by different names in English: House of Liars or, in this new edition published by Penguin Classics and NYRB Books, Lies and Sorcery.

Clemmie Read

Alexander Pushkin – Russia’s greatest letter-writer

Alexander Pushkin was brought to ruin by his letters more than once. When the Russian postal police intercepted a letter suggesting that atheism was ‘the most plausible’ philosophy, he was exiled to his mother’s bleak estate in the rural north-west. But his own temper was far more dangerous. In the autumn of 1836, he received a series of anonymous letters taunting him about his coquettish wife’s affair with George-Charles d’Anthès-Heeckeren, a French officer and the adopted son of the Dutch ambassador. Pushkin, imagining the ambassador himself had written them, fired off a furious letter of accusation. He and d’Anthès-Heeckeren duelled the next day, and Pushkin was fatally shot. Aged just 37, the most famous poet in Russia had thrown his life away on a few scribbled taunts.

Boyd Tonkin

Rebellion and repression: Oromay, by Baalu Girma, reviewed

‘We don’t want a James Bond adventure here,’ warns a jumpy spymaster as he grapples with an anti-state conspiracy in Oromay. Among other strands, that’s precisely what this fabled Ethiopian novel of 1983 delivers. Which is remarkable, given that Baalu Girma’s semi-autobiographical thriller of rebellion and repression, love and war, has been translated from Amharic. The ancient Semitic tongue of Ethiopia served as that nation’s official language long before English came to rule at court, and in courts. Girma was both a journalist and a novelist, educated in the US and an editor of English-language magazines in Addis Ababa. He evidently relished the various genres adroitly mined in Oromay.

Michael Arditti

The unfulfilled life: Ask Me Again, by Clare Sestanovich, reviewed

Eva, the protagonist of Clare Sestanovich’s debut novel, is a young woman struggling to find her place in the world. Over an unspecified period, anchored by references to the Occupy Wall Street movement and Donald Trump’s first election victory, we follow her from her adolescence in Brooklyn, through friendships and heartbreak at an ‘excellent college’, to journalism in Washington and nannying in Los Angeles. Despite her probing of everything (it’s no accident that all the chapter headings are questions), Eva receives few answers and doesn’t follow the usual bildungsroman path of self-discovery.

Tuesday

Sam Leith

A winter’s tale: Brightly Shining, by Ingvild Rishoi, reviewed

With Christmas only just gone, I hope it’s not too late to recommend Ingvild Rishoi’s bittersweet seasonal novella – a bestseller in Norway which now comes into English in Caroline Waight’s crisp and fluent prose. Here’s a child’s-eye story about adult griefs and troubles which uses dramatic irony to consistent effect; a skinny little narrative halfway to being a fable which nevertheless keeps its roots in reality, with mobile phones, Frosties, casual swearing, the workings of child protection services and the logistics and microeconomics of the Christmas tree business. The narrator, ten-year-old Ronja, and her teenage sister Melissa are growing up in Oslo with their alcoholic single dad. Things are pretty bleak.

Anne de Courcy

The Vikings never really went away

For many people, the mental picture of a Viking is of a blond giant in a horned helmet leaping out of a sharp-prowed longboat to pillage and slaughter the terrified inhabitants of the nearest village or monastery. The horned helmet is a myth, but the Vikings were, in general, red-haired or blond and taller than the Anglo-Saxons (Scandinavians are still, on average, an inch or so taller than Britons) and for almost 100 years raiding the English coast was what they did. As ‘heathens’, the Vikingsconsidered neither monasteries nor churches sacred Thanks to their unrivalled expertise in boat-building, they were unmatched as pirates – looting, taking prisoners for slavery or ransom or exacting tribute for not so doing. They applied the same technique to land piracy.

Philip Mansel

Versailles’s role as a palace of science

Versailles was a palace of science, as Anna Ferrari shows in this stimulating and innovative study, accompanying a dazzling exhibition of the same title at the Science Museum, London (until 21 April). Soldiers were subjected to electricity experiments in the Galerie des Glaces. The king watched the dissection of an elephant or a horse in the Menagerie. The latest globes and clocks, microscopes and barometers, miracles of precision and beauty, were, and in some cases still are, on display in the royal apartments. The gardens were exercises in trigonometry and hydraulics as well as planting. Louis XV had the largest and most varied plant collection in Europe.

Stuart Jeffries

The joy of discussing life’s great questions with a philosopher friend

At an improbable soirée in 1987, Mike Tyson was making aggressive sexual advances to the young model Naomi Campbell when the septuagenarian philosopher A.J. Ayer stepped in to demand that the boxer desist. ‘Do you know who I am? I’m the heavyweight champion of the world,’ snarled Tyson. ‘And I,’ replied Ayer, ‘am the former Wykeham Professor of Logic. We are both pre-eminent in our fields. I suggest we talk about this like rational men.’ And while Campbell sensibly slipped away, the odd couple did just that.

Sunday

David Vernon

Menacing masterpieces: Voices of the Fallen Heroes and Other Stories, by Yukio Mishima

The catalogue of 20th-century writers who committed suicide is long and sad: Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway and Sarah Kane, Stefan Zweig and Marina Tsvetaeva, to name only a few. Yet even amid this litany of literary misery, one name stands out for being perhaps more famous for their death than their work: Yukio Mishima (1925-70), who attempted a military coup before performing ritual suicide – hara-kiri – in the immediate aftermath of its failure. His long-planned, stage-managed, ostentatious and disturbing demise is not unconnected to his work, but it has dominated discussion of the writer ever since, significantly overshadowing his achievements – which were considerable, and led to his nomination for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times in the 1960s.

Matthew Mason

Bad air days: Savage Theories, by Pola Oloixarac, reviewed

According to a 2016 report published by the World Health Organisation, Argentina is the ‘therapy capital of the world’, boasting 222 psychologists per 100,000 people. Reading the Argentine writer Pola Oloixarac’s Savage Theories, I can understand why. The novel is quick to mock the posturing of the academic world, especially in Buenos Aires The novel follows three characters, each more bizarre and beguiling than the last. First we have our narrator, Rosa. She is a philosophy student at the University of Buenos Aires who becomes obsessed with, and attempts to seduce, her elderly professor Augusto Garcia Roxler, whose ‘Theory of Egoic Transmissions’ charts man’s evolution from prey to predator.

Adam Rutherford

Has the term ‘racist’ become devalued through overuse?

One of the key charges made by the hard of thinking is that because the devastating accusation ‘racist’ has been thrown around so casually in these days of febrile public discourse, it no longer has meaning. Similarly, ever since Rik called Vyv (and a bank manager and the BBC) a fascist in The Young Ones, that insult has been devalued to the point of meaninglessness. Or has it? One can never truly know the heart of another person, so short of them lighting a crucifix on their front lawn and perpetrating violence exclusively against one racially designated group over another, we are compelled to only assume that if you often say things that sound a bit racist you might be legitimately given the identity of ‘a racist’.

Lee Langley

Rumpelstiltskin retold: Alive in the Merciful Country, by A.L. Kennedy, reviewed

For Anna, wickedness istypified by the villain ofa fairy tale –Rumpelstiltskin The narrator of Alive in the Merciful Country is a woman weighed down by past trauma ‘like a bag full of broken kaleidoscopes’. Anna is a teacher steering her nine-year-old pupils through the 2020 lockdown while coping with life as the single mother of a troubled teenage boy, trying to rebuild trust after a shattering betrayal: ‘I didn’t ask to be in a spy scenario, or an action scenario, or a political thriller, but I recurringly have been.’ Damaged by life, she has learned to question misuse of power, personal and political: quis custodiet ipsos custodes indeed. Fans of A.L. Kennedy will love this book.

Lynn Barber

‘You can really sing!’ – Sonny discovers the teenage Cher

This is a very odd book. Where you’d expect to find an author’s photo inside the dust-jacket it just says: ‘Cher is a global icon.’ As for the ending – there isn’t one. It feels as though the publishers snatched the manuscript out of Cher’s hands almost mid-sentence, saying: ‘Keep the rest for Part Two.’ Still, it’s a breathlessly exciting story. With 5,000 screaming fans at the airport, success had arrived. And Cher was still only 19 ‘I mean, jeez, my family,’ Cher exclaims at one point, ‘you couldn’t make it up.’ Her mother Jackie Jean, a dazzling beauty from a dirt-poor Arkansas background, had been taught not to sleep with anyone before marriage.