Book review

Thursday

Alexandra Coghlan

Mozart’s mischievous muse

From our UK edition

If you were to compare Mozart to a bird it wouldn’t be the starling. Possibly the wood thrush or nightingale, with their beautiful, haunting songs; or maybe the lyrebird with its astonishing ear for imitation; or perhaps the composer would find his match in the exotic rarity of the ivory-billed woodpecker or giant ibis. But the common starling? More pest than pet in its adoptive North American home, this ‘ubiquitous, non-native, invasive species’ seems an unlikely fit for a singular prodigy. So thought the ecophilosopher and naturalist Lyanda Lynn Haupt, when she started work on this book, exploring the composer’s relationship with the bird he bought after hearing it singing one of his piano concertos, and kept as a pet until its death.

Katrina Gulliver

The fruits of imperialism

From our UK edition

Imagine yourself a middle-class person in England in the 1870s. You sit down to drink a cup of tea while reading The Spectator. It probably doesn’t cross your mind, but in your hand you hold products from around the world. Your tea is from Ceylon, the sugar in it from Jamaica, and your porcelain cup was made in China. Your afternoon refreshment is the culmination of global trade developed over centuries. In A Thirst for Empire, Erika Rappaport traces how tea became a staple of the British diet after arriving in the 17th century, and has not lost its popularity yet. This is a detailed work, at over 400 pages of small print, but provides interesting explorations of the health-giving powers attributed to tea, and how it came to be seen as a wholesome and vital drink.

Thursday

Niall Griffiths

The search for meaning

From our UK edition

He’s not what you’d call prolific, Bernard MacLaverty. Midwinter Break is his fifth novel in 40 years, and his first in 16. And, in that time, it could be argued that Irish writers have moved away from his bare and declarative style into the wildness of, say, a Barry or a Barrett or a Baume; word-typhoons, of an affinity with the febrile and fervid times. What cannot be doubted, though, is MacLaverty’s awareness of, and wide aliveness to, the world’s flux, its writhings in the decades since his first novel Lamb; in his latest, his deep familiarity with, and angry love for, the workings of the UK, and Europe, and the globe are displayed stark and clear, the stylistic precision of their expression becoming a haven from a hot and hyper-active mediated age.

Anjali Joseph

Change and decay | 17 August 2017

From our UK edition

Writing of his grandmother’s cremation, Kushanava Choudhury reflects in The Epic City that, while his expatriate Indian cousins are separated from the occasion, ‘I was sipping tea in Nimtala, present in the moment at the centre of our world’. It’s Choudhury’s longing to be back in this centre, which might have seemed less than obviously central to a metropolitan American, that takes him to Calcutta after he graduates from Princeton. He spends a few years working at the Statesman, Calcutta’s most venerable English newspaper, and later returns to the city, eventually getting married to his girlfriend, who happens also to be an American of Bengali origin.

Dorian Lynskey

A countercultural upheaval

From our UK edition

‘New York stories in a way are always real estate stories,’ says the journalist Alan Light in Lizzy Goodman’s bustling oral history of the city’s music scene at the dawn of the century. The same goes for all music scenes. Talent clusters and thrives only where there are cheap places to live, hang out, play shows and, crucially, fail. New York in 2001 was such a location. The Lower East Side was still affordably sketchy and Brooklyn far from hip. When Dave Sitek from TV on the Radio moved to Williamsburg and invited his Manhattan friends to visit, ‘It was like I was asking them to go to China on a single--engine prop plane.’ Now Williamsburg, like Manhattan, belongs to the well-heeled.

Alex Clark

The man who disappeared

From our UK edition

Walking out of one’s own life — unpredictably, perhaps even without premeditation and certainly without anything approaching a plan — is a common staple of fantasy, and therefore fiction. But why, when we spend so much of the rest of the time fretting about losing what we have and hatching plans to safeguard it? In this short, powerful novel, the Swiss writer Peter Stamm, suggests some oblique but compelling possibilities. Thomas and Astrid have returned from a holiday with their two children and begun the ordinary business of resettling: unpacking, laundry, a last glass of wine in the garden. As Astrid tends to the house, Thomas walks down the path and, after only a momentary hesitation, through the gate.

Matthew Adams

In Woolf’s clothing

From our UK edition

Martin Amis once said that the writer’s life is half ambition and half anxiety. While one part of your brain is jabbering away to the effect that, with proper application, you might be the next Jane Austen, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, a larger part — almost always more tenacious and assertive — is busy insisting that you don’t have it in you to pick up a pen. In Fiona Melrose’s second novel, which follows the subtle and reflective Midwinter of 2016, this confluence of aspiration and unease can be felt with unusual force. The book takes place over the course of a single day — 6 December 2013 — in Johannesburg, the city in which Melrose was born and in which she still spends much of her time.

Nicholas Lezard

A bad taste in the mouth

From our UK edition

Here is the opening sentence of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s meditation on beds.: With its four legs and its flat, soft surface, the bed gently accommodates one of our most basic needs: it is good to lie down in bed, and it is good to sleep in them through the night. Well, you learn something every day. Actually you do, if you are very young, or at least you are meant to. For this is one of Knausgaard’s letters to his unborn daughter, and he’s written one book for each season, 20 letters per month, for her to be able to see the world, or for Knausgaard to see it again, anew. It is a mission freighted with honourable intent.

Robert Carver

The roots of witchcraft

From our UK edition

Until the mid-1960s many historians believed witchcraft was a pre-Christian pagan fertility ritual, witches worshipping the Horned God, whose consort was the Triple Goddess. The most notable advocate of this theory was the Egyptologist Margaret Murray. Then came revisionists led by Norman Cohn. Examination of witch trials suggested there had been no witchcraft: it was a ‘social construct’ of the Christian patriarchy persecuting innocent women, as it had innocent Jews indicted for the same satanic practices. Professor Hutton is a follower of Cohn.

Mary Wakefield

The end of brotherly love

From our UK edition

You can never completely leave a religious cult, as this strange and touching memoir demonstrates. Patterns of thinking, turns of mind, will linger with and haunt former members long after they escape. Rebecca Stott was born in 1964 into the Brethren, a low-church sect that had broken away from the Anglican church in the early 19th century and then broken away from itself, bifurcating into factions as movements set on purity and unity usually do. Cult is a strong word, but Stott’s branch of the Brethren really earned it. Her great grandfather, a sail-maker, joined the Brethren in Eyemouth, a fishing village not far from where I grew up in Northumberland. Back then the Brethren there was founded on frustration with the tax-collecting Kirk.

Frances Wilson

Two enquiring minds

From our UK edition

Samuel Pepys, wrote John Evelyn, was ‘universally beloved, hospitable, generous, learned in many things’ and ‘skilled in music’. John Evelyn, wrote Pepys, ‘must be allowed … for a little conceitedness; but he may well be so, being a man so much above others’. Pepys’s assessment of Evelyn was made early in their relationship, in 1665, and Evelyn’s assessment of Pepys was made on the day that his fellow diarist died, in 1703. So rest the reputations of our two great recorders of Restoration England: Pepys, the middle-class son of a tailor, was a man of the people; Evelyn, the heir of a country gentleman, was a notch or two above.

Thursday

Roland Elliott Brown

Heroines of the Soviet Union

From our UK edition

Klara Goncharova, a Soviet anti-aircraft gunner, wondered at the end of the second world war how anyone could stand to give birth after learning about Auschwitz and Dachau. But as it turned out, she was already pregnant. Anastasia Voropaeva, a corporal and searchlight operator, recalled a pretty Russian girl in liberated territory who had been raped and impregnated by her German ‘boss’ and had hanged herself after victory rather than give birth to a ‘little Fritz’. Albina Gantimurova remembered nearly shooting an adolescent member of the German Volkssturm in Berlin before he burst into tears and took her hand. Svetlana Alexievich finished The Unwomanly Face of War, the first of her astonishing oral histories of Soviet life, in 1983.

John Self

The evil that men do | 3 August 2017

From our UK edition

The first thing to say about Claudio Magris’s new novel is that it is, in an important sense, unreadable. There is no possibility of turning page after page engaged in finding out what comes next, of being lost in the characters’ stories. The usual pleasures of fiction are so thoroughly absent that the reader emerges at the other end blinking into the light, struggling to remember what all the fuss about books is anyway. This is apt, perhaps, for a novel about historic suffering and man’s inhumanity to man. The conceit is that an unnamed collector has amassed a hangar-sized museum of war, full of weaponry and the historical accoutrements of conflict.

Ian Sansom

A choice of first novels | 3 August 2017

From our UK edition

Remember Douglas Coupland? Remember Tama Janowitz? Remember Lisa St Aubin de Terán? Banana Yoshimoto? Françoise Sagan? The voice of your generation? (If you’ve forgotten the voice of your generation, the brilliant Christopher Fowler’s forthcoming The Book of Forgotten Authors will provide you with the necessary reminder. The voice of my generation, as far as I’m able to recall, was a poet called Attila the Stockbroker, who we used to go and see perform in Harlow, and who did an excellent Peel session. Whatever the hell happened to Attila the Stockbroker?) Three new debut novels might all properly be acclaimed as representing the voice of their generation — though who knows, only time will tell.

Helen R Brown

Torn between envy and contempt

From our UK edition

Arriving at boarding school with the wrong shoes and a teddy bear in his suitcase, the hero of Elizabeth Day’s fourth novel is the latest in a long literary line of suburban lost boys sucked into the intoxicating orbit of a wealthy friend. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Evelyn Waugh, Patricia Highsmith, Ian McEwan, Alan Hollinghurst and Gillian Flynn have all done it before and we know the story never ends well. Day drops references to them all into her book, like olives into an increasingly dirty martini. We know from the outset that a crime has been committed. We first meet Martin Gilmour in a police interview room, the day after his friend Ben Fitzmaurice’s 40th birthday party in the summer of 2012.

Kate Womersley

No pain, no gain

From our UK edition

It is an unexpected pleasure when fiction has a soundtrack to accompany the work of reviewing. H(A)PPY is ‘best enjoyed in conjunction with Agustin Barrios: The Complete Historical Guitar Recordings’, Nicola Barker advises before her text gets underway. It’s tempting to dismiss this as a gimmick. But Barrios’s music strikes a deep chord with the rebellion at the heart of Barker’s 12th novel. Born in the 1880s, the Paraguayan’s playing was ridiculed because he preferred his guitar strings to be made of steel rather than fashionable gut. His dissonant art, like Barker’s today, could not be accused of courting admiration.

Thursday

Julie Burchill

A cacophony of complaint

From our UK edition

What sort of monster gives a bad review to a book by someone who was gang raped as a 12-year-old and subsequently goes on to eat herself to over 40 stone? Probably the sort of monster who’s never read a book about fatness as a feminist issue which she found convincing. Here we go again: ‘This is what most girls are taught — we should be slender and small. We should not take up space. And most women know this — that we are supposed to disappear.’ This ignores the fact that plump women were a benchmark of beauty in the past — when women had no rights whatsoever — and still are in cultures where, again, women have very few rights.

Ian Sansom

… trailing strands in all directions

From our UK edition

Letters of Intent — letters of the intense. Keen readers of Cynthia Ozick (are there any other kind?) will of course already have copies of the books from which these often fiery essays have been selected. There’s a broad range of work represented here, from personal essays through to Ozick’s often rather profound philosophical enquiries into the meaning of art and religion — though the inclusion of no fewer than five essays on Henry James, two on Kafka, two on Virginia Woolf and two on Saul Bellow might make one wish for a little more breathing room, a little more room to roam. But this is a quibble. This is Cynthia Ozick, for goodness sake.

Adam Nicolson

Spirits from the vasty deep…

From our UK edition

‘The sea defines us, connects us, separates us,’ Philip Hoare has written. His prize-winning Leviathan, then a collection of essays called The Sea Inside and now RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR together make a loose, meditative trilogy on people, the ocean, its inhabitants, its threats and delights, the comings and goings, the whole tidal business, its excitements and its ever-present grip on our minds and imaginations. The sea ‘deals life and death for innocent and guilty alike’, he says, and that all-pervasiveness is both his subject and his method. The rather exciting slidtogether words of this title (and of all his chapter titles) give a hint of what the book is about. This is not the sea in any historical, scientific or practical sense.

Emily Rhodes

The dark side of creativity

From our UK edition

In Eureka, Anthony Quinn gives us all the enjoyable froth we could hope for in a novel about making a film in the 1960s — champagne, drugs, threesomes, gangsters, a Silver Cloud Rolls-Royce, hula-hooping girls and Pucci scarves flung over smears of vomit. Underneath, however, lies an intellectual question. The film is an adaptation of Henry James’s ‘The Figure in the Carpet’, a story about obsessively trying to understand the secret key that unlocks an author’s work: ‘The idea that governs the whole and gives it meaning… a string that my pearls were strung on.’ (Ought I admit that I enjoyed Quinn’s saucy 1960s screenplay, spliced between chapters of the novel, more than James’s original?