More from Books

Saturday

William Leith

Behind the net curtains

Waking Up in Toytown, by John Burnside The Freedoms of Suburbia, by Paul Barker Finding himself in a lunatic asylum, and then at a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, John Burnside has an idea. He wants a normal life. His idea is to move to the suburbs, because it is there, he feels, that he might become ‘a regular, everyday sort of guy. The next-door neighbour whose name you can never remember, the one who keeps himself to himself, but is basically OK.’ Does he really want a normal life? I’m not so sure. In any case, he arrives in Surrey, seeking ‘a Surbiton of the mind’, and ends up on the edge of Guildford, in a shared flat, with an addiction counsellor and a determination to give up drinking. Pretty soon, though, he is beginning to waver.

Ian Sansom

Another damned thick, square book

William T. Vollmann ruined my Christmas. But he also made my year. Like a fisherman scared by reports of mysterious beasts and monsters — Here be dragons! Gryphon! Basilisk! Unicorn! Serpent! — I’d been put off for a long time by Vollmann’s reputation as the great white whale of American fiction, the New Maximalists’ Maximalist, a kind of vaster, stodgier, blubberier David Foster Wallace. And Vollmann’s much discussed obsessions with prostitution, destitution, degradation — exhaustingly detailed in his many and often mega-books, from You Bright and Risen Angels (1987) right through to the seven-volume Rising Up and Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom, and Urgent Means (2003) — are not my own. Frankly, I like nice.

Lucy Hugheshallett

Shock and awe | 16 January 2010

Luisa Casati was a virtuosa in the art of making a spectacle of herself. Born in 1881, she inherited an immense fortune and spent it all (she died destitute) on making herself a ‘living work of art’. She had very little conversation. ‘Wisely, she seldom uttered’, noted Harold Acton. Instead she posed, and the pictures assembled in this book demonstrate how well she did it. Orphaned at 13, and married before she was 20 to a Milanese aristocrat from whom she soon separated, Casati was an unconventional beauty, whom Marinetti, the founder of the Futuirist movement, described as having ‘the satisfied air of a panther that has devoured the bars of its cage’. Her heyday spanned the two decades centring on the first world war.

Allan Massie

A reader’s writer

Some people say that nothing happens to them, but everything happens to the writer who sees the world around him as material for fiction. Francis King is such a writer, which explains why he has been able to go on writing novels and stories for longer than many of his readers and indeed publishers have been alive. When someone who brought out his first book in 1946 while an Oxford undergraduate publishes a novel as good, fresh, intelligent and moving as Cold Snap more than 60 years later, it is almost inevitable that reviewers should remark on his extraordinary literary longevity and his seemingly inexhaustible vitality. And yet this is, in all ways but one, beside the point. To dwell on his age is invidious and misleading.

Lucinda Baring

One for the road

Have you ever been on holiday and struggled to choose a guidebook? I mean, where does one start? I imagine in a bookshop. But, if anything, that makes the task even harder. The choice is just too wide. Waterstones sell around 12 guidebooks per major city — far more if you want a whole country (there are a staggering 23 on India, for example). So I asked around. Which guidebook, if any (young travellers are increasingly turning to the web and online travel forums for advice whilst others are too mean to buy a guidebook and rely on friends’ recommendations, a hotel map and a good concièrge), did they choose when heading off on a mini-break? Were they faithful to a particular brand or did they judge a book by its cover? ‘I take the Times World Atlas,’ said one.

Saturday

Philip Hensher

Addle-pated modernist

In 1564 a book was published calculating that there were 7,409,127 demons at work in the world, under the administrative control of 79 demon-princes. Eight years later, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne began to write his Essays, a book which still seems to speak to us directly with all the force of rational understanding and an identifiable human personality. If Montaigne marks the beginning of modernity, it is because he tells us exactly what he is like; how he sees the world, fallibly and yet honestly; and because there was no book in the world like it before, and we are still writing books rather like it today. Montaigne, in common with all great authors, has continued to be infinitely applicable.

Pj Kavanagh

Continuity under threat

This handsome and encouraging book is perhaps unfortunate in its title. The suggestion is that the author has been forced to rummage among the wreckage that is England in order to find something, anything, that is still intact. Its origins and intentions are quite the opposite. As Richard Ingrams explains in his short introduction, when he was editor of Private Eye he published a regular feature called ‘Nooks and Corners of the New Barbarism’, written by John Betjeman — a suitable kind of investigation for a satirical magazine.

Roy Foster

Strong family feelings

Mary Kenny’s survey of Ireland’s relations with the British monarchy is characteristically breezy, racy and insightful, with a salty strain of anecdote. Mary Kenny’s survey of Ireland’s relations with the British monarchy is characteristically breezy, racy and insightful, with a salty strain of anecdote. This reflects the secret affection of the Irish bourgeoisie for the royal soap opera, even when this addiction has to be concealed as carefully as a taste for alcohol in a fundamentalist Muslim state. Oddly, her account of secret suburban Catholic covens, communing with royal weddings and jubilees via television, rather trumps my memories of royalist interests among the Protestant (though emphatically not Anglo-Irish) circles of my youth.

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Master of accretion

Frank Auerbach (born 1931) is one of the most interesting artists working in Europe today, a philosophical painter of reality who works and re-works his pictures before he discovers something new, something worth saving. William Feaver, in this grand new monograph, calls Auerbach’s paintings ‘feats of concentration’, and stresses the hard work which goes into their construction, despite their appearance of spontaneity. Feaver has a gift for the evocative phrase: ‘Studied yet impulsive, ranging from darkness to radiance and from the declamatory to the subdued, they are keyed to an air of resolve as unguarded as joy, as involuntary as grief.’ This is a book strong on context.

Anita Brookner

Prize-winning novels from France | 2 January 2010

After an unremarkable year for fiction the Prix Goncourt was awarded to Marie Ndiaye for a novel — actually three novellas — which must have beguiled the judges by the sheer unfamiliarity of its contents. After an unremarkable year for fiction the Prix Goncourt was awarded to Marie Ndiaye for a novel — actually three novellas — which must have beguiled the judges by the sheer unfamiliarity of its contents. Trois femmes puissantes (Gallimard) was already established as a favourite with the reading public. One suspects that the majority of those readers are women, for we are in feminist territory here, and it feels a little old-fashioned.

Wednesday

Jonathan Sumption

Poisonous relations

‘The Axis powers and France,’ declared Marshall Pétain and Hitler at Montoire in October 1940, ‘have a common interest in the defeat of England as soon as possible.’ Why this should have been so is one of the many interesting questions to which this book offers no satisfactory answer. ‘The Axis powers and France,’ declared Marshall Pétain and Hitler at Montoire in October 1940, ‘have a common interest in the defeat of England as soon as possible.’ Why this should have been so is one of the many interesting questions to which this book offers no satisfactory answer. France capitulated in June 1940 on terms which assumed that Britain would follow her example and that the war would shortly end.

Neil Clark

The face of a muffin

What was it about post-war British cinema? Our films were lit up by a collection of wonderfully idiosyncratic performers. Think Alistair Sim, Terry-Thomas and Robert Morley. Perhaps the most idiosyncratic of them all was Margaret Rutherford. The drama critic, J. C. Trewin once remarked, ‘When you have seen any performance by Margaret Rutherford you are certain to remember it.’ How right he was. She stole Blithe Spirit with her portrayal of the exuberant bicycling medium, Madame Arcati. She was wonderful as Miss Whitchurch, the domineering headmistress of a girls’ school mistakenly billeted at a boys’ school in The Happiest Days of Your Life. And she was a far more colourful and entertaining Miss Marple than the rather grey character in Agatha Christie.

Philip Ziegler

Some sunny day!

In August 1945 Cyril Patmore of the Royal Scots Fusiliers returned on compassionate leave from India. A few weeks earlier his wife had written to confess that she was expecting a child by an Italian prisoner of war. ‘Why oh why darling did I have to let you down, me who loves you more than life itself?’ she wrote, pleading for forgiveness and a reconciliation. It was in vain. Patmore stabbed his wife to death. ‘I live for my children and my wife,’ he told the police. ‘I hope the children will be well looked after.’ This bleak anecdote introduces a catalogue of disasters. At the end of the war five million Britons, 90 per cent of them male, were in uniform.

Byron Rogers

Racists, pigs and hysterics

I cannot remember getting so much pleasure from a book. It is not just its beauty, the handmade paper, the quarter leather, the engraving of the Rhaeadr Falls cut in purple into the cover cloth of something the size of an atlas. These are accidental details (as, I note bemusedly, is the fact that it costs £300 more than the current value of my car). For this, quite simply, is the funniest book I have read in years. Its godfather seems to have been Napoleon, whose wars sealed Europe off to the Romantics. In other words, he deprived them of their fixes of the Sublime, the Picturesque, the Prospects of Infinity; the Emperor deprived them of mountains. So where were they to go?

Judith Flanders

Not perfect freedom

‘Servants’ and ‘service’ have not always meant ‘servility’. ‘Servants’ and ‘service’ have not always meant ‘servility’. From the Middle Ages right through to the 16th century, everyone was servant to someone: a lord was servant to the king, a lesser lord to a greater. Children likewise served in the households of their parents’ equals: service was what one did before God, and before one’s superiors, in class, or age. And many servants were for display as much as utility: as the consumer durables of their time, their number gave their masters’ prosperity in physical form.

James Scudamore

Objects of obsession

The Museum of Innocence is the sixth novel by Turkey’s most garlanded novelist and his first since he became a Nobel laureate in 2006. The Museum of Innocence is the sixth novel by Turkey’s most garlanded novelist and his first since he became a Nobel laureate in 2006. Pamuk’s unflinching eye on his country’s history has brought him well-documented trouble, but it is in the subtle exploration of how west and east collude and collide there that he excels, notably in the novel My Name Is Red, a bravura extemporisation on art and representation at the Ottoman court of the 16th century, and in the more modern setting of his political thriller, Snow.

Monday

Ferdinand Mount

A long journey

I never liked E. M. Forster much. He was too preachy and prissy, too snobbish about the suburbs, too contemptuous of the lower classes. I know this is not how a review is meant to begin. You may legitimately kick off by admitting that you have a soft spot for your subject, even perhaps that you used to be friends. But reveal a longstanding dislike in your first paragraph, and the reader may reasonably wonder why the editor did not give the book to someone else. My only excuse for this confession is that I am not alone. For a novelist, essayist and critic of such acknowledged eminence, Forster has had a surprising number of enemies. There was something about him that got people’s goat, and still does.

Francis King

A great novelist

In a remarkable way the trajectory of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s reputation after her death in 1967 parallels that of George Meredith’s in 1909. In a remarkable way the trajectory of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s reputation after her death in 1967 parallels that of George Meredith’s in 1909. A recipient of the OM and held in awe by such younger novelists as Henry James, Hardy and Stevenson, Meredith was generally regarded as one of the greatest writers of his time. But now, apart from his poetry — which he himself rightly thought superior to his prose — he is little read, even though every history of English Literature contains a lengthy entry for him.

David Ekserdjian

The king of chiaroscuro

These days, it is easy to take it for granted that Caravaggio (1571-1610) is the most popular of the old masters, yet it was not ever thus. In my Baedeker’s Central Italy (published exactly 100 years ago), he is acknowledged as having been ‘the chief of the Naturalist School’, but it is pointed out that from the outset ‘it was objected that his drawing was bad, that he failed in the essential of grouping the figures in his larger compositions.’ The first major exhibition of his works — in what has only very recently been established as the city of his birth, Milan — did not take place until 1951.