More from Books

Wednesday

Christopher Howse

By so many, to so few

Eric Ringmar has only been blogging since last year, but has already been sacked from his job as a lecturer at the London School of Economics. What did he do wrong? Nothing, by his account. First I must say parenthetically, for those who take no cognisance of such things, that blogs are no more than diaries that people post up on their own websites, hoping that some desperate wanderer or other in cyberspace might like to read them. For the first few weeks that Ringmar blogged, not many people noticed he was blogging at all.

Saturday

Graham Stewart

Too much zeal

Many of us are beginning to weary of the pushier sort of ‘expert’. Gone is the sense of proportion, the admission of scientific doubt, the ability to weigh risks against benefits. Taking seriously a year’s worth of their health warnings would give anyone an eating disorder. It hardly builds confidence when so much of the advice directly contradicts whatever was confidently pronounced beneficial only months previously. The natural reaction is to take it all with a pinch of salt (if that is still allowed) and assume that the hasty appearance of a government minister on the one o’ clock news to endorse the latest findings is an early indication that they will transpire to be nonsense.

Simon Baker

Smitten for life

Ricardo Somocurcio, the narrator of The Bad Girl, is an unambitious man whose sole wish, ever since his childhood in Peru, has been to live in Paris. He studied hard at school and, on arriving in Paris after university, learns languages and soon makes enough money from working as a freelance interpreter to stay in his chosen home. He has a mild concern that he is simply drifting, but in fact his lack of aspirations is nothing worse than the result of being a balanced, civilised individual, happy if he has a reasonable income and enough time to enjoy reading and socialising. However, Ricardo’s existence is never as quiet as it should be, thanks to the ‘bad girl’.

Anne Chisholm

Growing old gracefully

Ninety may be the new 70, but it is also seriously old, and no picnic. In her short, sharp, disconcerting new book, Diana Athill, the renowned editor turned writer who has just reached her 90th birthday, does not try to pretend otherwise; pretending is not, and never has been, her style. Here, she contemplates her own experience of growing older, compares it with some others, and offers a few tips to the rest of us, as we, or people we love, advance towards the minefield. In many ways, she acknowledges, she has been, and still is, lucky. Born into a confident upper-middle-class family, imbued with what she now regards as ‘tribal smugness,’ she went to Oxford before the war and soon found the work she loved.

Grey Gowrie

Undoing the folded lie

 by , , , ISBN When you buy this book (and buy you should for reasons that follow), try reading the notes to A New Waste Land before the poem itself. This is not because the poem is ‘difficult’ or in any sense obscure. On the contrary, Horowitz is an oral poet, a performer: veteran of his own Poetry Olympics and countless gigs over half a century in coffee bars or at the Albert Hall. A founder of late 1950s poetry-and-jazz occasions, he makes use of repetition, catch-phrases, comic-awful puns, message-hammering riffs. These give way to long lyric passages of seeming improvisation, in the manner of Coltrane or Rollins. The beautiful kite-flying sequence in the present work is one such example; a little lamenting passage for his late wife another.

Jonathan Sumption

From one extreme to the other

Decolonisation has not been a happy experience for Africa. But nowhere in the continent has it been as disastrous as in Algeria. The country had once been the most successful of France’s colonies. Before the war, it was rich in resources and heavily subsidised by France. The educational system worked moderately well. It had produced a large class of native Algerians who spoke French, felt at home in France and successfully integrated themselves into the structures of the state. Politically, Algeria was a départment of France. There was a large European settlement, kept on top by a gerrymandered voting system. What would have happened if it had remained French into the age when such arrangements were no longer defensible? A different France perhaps.

Malcolm Deas

Going on and on

Fidel Castro, hélas, et encore, hélas, hélas. Castro is the most famous Latin American since Bolívar, one of the few to have achieved world fame. He deserves it, as a third-world revolutionary and as a survivor. There are many studies of him, and here is another, the product of some hundred hours of interviews conducted by Ignacio Ramonet, whose inexhaustible stamina in serving him up sycophantic lobs seems to have surprised even Castro himself. Though monumentally uncritical and containing few if any new revelations, it is not entirely useless. It summarises the Castro line on a wide range of subjects.

Carole Angier

Always on the side of the wolf

Poor old Fordie. That was Ford’s eternal cry, and it is repeated often here. His father called him ‘the patient but extremely stupid Ass’, his very name — Huffer — meant ‘Ass’, so was changed first to Hueffer, then to Ford. As a writer he was disliked (‘It is me they dislike, not the time-shift’), as a returning Great War soldier loathed; even as a Sussex smallholder he is a figure of fun, followed everywhere by a dog, a drake and a goat. Above all, after years of war he is forgotten as a writer, ‘as good as dead’, convinced he could no longer write. He is an outsider, a dung beetle, a ‘ruined author’, misunderstood and despised. Poor old Fraudie.

Saturday

Interconnect

A Christmas Song

A Christmas Song Why is the baby crying On this, his special day, When we have brought him lovely gifts And laid them on the hay? He’s crying for the people Who greet this day with dread Because somebody dear to them Is far away or dead, For all the men and women Whose love affairs went wrong, Who try their best at merriment When Christmas comes along, For separated parents Whose turn it is to grieve While children hang their stockings up Elsewhere on Christmas Eve, For everyone whose burden Carried through the year, Is heavier at Christmastime, The season of good cheer. That’s why the baby’s crying There in the cattle stall: He’s crying for those people. He’s crying for them all.

Margaret Macmillan

When the sun finally set

I first read the Raj Quartet in the early 1970s, when Paul Scott’s decision to set his novels in the dying days of the British Raj in India seemed an eccentric choice, almost as though he did not want readers. The British were tired of their imperial past. Who wanted to know the names of the long gone empire builders whose statues dotted cities and towns? Only a few students wanted to study imperial history. (I was one, perhaps because Canadians were acutely aware of how being part of a great empire had shaped them.) The empire to most people in Britain was an embarrassment, a joke, and a bore. It must have been galling to Scott that critical recognition of what is an extraordinary contribution to English literature was so slow in coming.

Kit Wright

Metal

Metal A steelmill town, a ridge of pine, The taste of snow upon the tongue, Meant all the world was black and white At Christmastime when he was young. In softened angle, muted line, The harshnesses became oblique. The keening lathes were pacified: All quiet on the frozen creek. And it was Christmas when he died Far off, no place on earth to go, But fresh as in his childhood came The scent of metal and of snow.

John Gross

From Charles Lamb to ‘netiquette’

A few years ago the American author Anne Fadiman scored a hit with Ex Libris, an amiable miscellany of book-talk touching lightly on such topics as the quirks of proof-reading and the vicissitudes of plagiarism. The subject matter of her new book, At Large and At Small, is much more varied, but the flavour is scarcely less literary. It is a collection of essays, designed to illustrate the continuing possibilities of what used to be known as the familiar essay — the bundle of personal reflections of which the most famous exponent was Charles Lamb. Familiar essays, cherished in their heyday by belletrists and inflicted on generations of schoolchildren, have long since lost favour as a literary form. But Fadiman isn’t afraid of being thought old-fashioned.

Victoria Glendinning

More marks on paper

Life is not fair. Talents are not distributed equitably. The likelihood is that if you are good at one thing, you will be good at other things too. But there is a twist in the tail. The more things you are good at, the less you will be perceived as pre-eminent in any of them. The American Paul Horgan, for example — singer, actor, set-designer, painter, poet, writer of stories, essays, novels, plays and libretti — is quoted in The Writer’s Brush as deploring his ‘accursed versatility’, and the truth is that I, unlike my better-informed readers, am unfamiliar with his oeuvre. A few of the writer-artists featured in this hefty book are first-class at neither authorship nor art, and most are much better writers than they are artists, or vice versa.

Vernon Scannell

A Yorkshire Christmas Eve

A Yorkshire Christmas Eve His nearby town wore annual evening-dress, cheap jewellery of lights, white fur and bright drapes of Santa red which might impress late shoppers on this final trading-night, persuading them to spend their all before indifferent time slammed shut the last shop door. He heard hyena voices and he saw splashed vomit on the pavement as he left saddened by this evidence of more contempt of what was once the numinous. He headed for the moors and his small house. Later on, as he prepared for bed, he could not rid himself of melancholy: the world had changed, Christmas seemed stone-dead or turned into a tasteless parody of what was thrilling once, yet innocent.

Greta Stoddart

A Puzzle in Four Seasons

A Puzzle in Four Seasons Look at us. It must be Christmas. Our heads are bowed, the lamp close. We could be cracking a code or a body, so intent are we tonight on Spring, whose large foreground of wild daffodils could take us all winter. We check the lid from time to time like artists more absorbed in what they’re doing than what’s there: a village coming into itself all at once, in all weathers; yielding itself to nothing more than the hours of its own slow resurrection. It’s not often we come together like this. Nor do we believe for one minute in this village or its charmed stoicism. We attend to it quietly, with quick fingers.

Roger Lewis

Perfecting the art of rudeness

Everyone will have met Basil and Sybil Fawlty in real life — the would-be genteel types who, in running a provincial hotel, have condemned themselves to quite the wrong vocation, who are convinced their clientele are riff-raff and by whom the most modest request is interpreted as an unforgivable imposition. I encountered a classic couple only the other day — the virago muttering behind the desk, pen poised, and her lanky, put-upon husband sighing to me as he emerged from the cellar and lifted (quite violently) the grille at the bar, ‘Has the Gestapo given you the wine list?’ Such people loathe the idea of service — like those antique dealers and gallery owners who’ll kill you if they get mistaken for shopkeepers.

Rachel Johnson

Sunlight on stucco

This affordably handsome book confirms in my own partisan mind what a rich subject the area of Notting Hill in London is, and I can’t help approving of it for that reason alone. Like it or not, Notting Hill exerts a peculiar fascination over many who don’t live there as well as all who do, but it is the latter who will fall on this book with cries of pleasure. It is a solid rebuff to those who prefer to think that Notting Hill is not so much a place of bricks and mortar, but an annoying media construct instead.

David Ekserdjian

A choice of art books

First, and by no means simply by virtue of its weight, is Judy Egerton’s George Stubbs, Painter: Catalogue Raisonné (Yale, £95), which effortlessly combines awesome scholarly authority with what in academic circles is, alas, a far rarer commodity — wit. Seen whole and supported by such eloquent advocacy, Stubbs emerges as a truly great artist, who has been held back by his Britishness and his subject matter. As Judy Egerton rightly observes, it was the subject of the Fitzwilliam’s ‘Gimcrack’ — a racehorse with jockey up — ‘whose seeming triviality had long caused more nervous art historians to twitch their petticoats’.

Juliet Townsend

Children’s books for Christmas | 15 December 2007

Part of the charm of giving books to children at Christmas is that they are so easy to wrap. After an evening spent wrestling with a variety of soft toys with elongated limbs and tails, a large combine harvester, an assortment of weapons and a pogo stick, it is a relief to settle down to all those nice regular rectangles. Christmas is also the only time that many children get given hardbacks, and the opportunity to enjoy a book as an object, not simply for its contents. One agreeable object is the latest edition of Clement Moore’s well known poem The Night Before Christmas, with beautiful black- and-white cut-paper illustrations by Niroot Puttapipat (Walker Books, £12.99.

Patrick Marnham

A gathering of ghosts

Fire in the Blood is the second recently discovered and hitherto unpublished novel by the author of Suite Française, the two-volume work that was written shortly before French police arrested Irène Némirovsky in July 1942 and deported her to Auschwitz. The story of the discovery of Suite Française, the child running from the gendarmes who had just arrested her mother and grabbing a briefcase that contained the manuscript of a posthumous masterpiece, has become one of the great biographical anecdotes of the French Occupation. But the same small briefcase also contained another fragment, this time an un-titled typescript that led researchers in the Némirovsky archive to the complete version of Fire in the Blood.