Book review

Thursday

Paul Keegan

Roaming in the gloaming

From our UK edition

One of the epigraphs to Peter Davidson’s nocturne on Europe’s arts of twilight is from Hegel: ‘The owl of Minerva begins to fly only at dusk’, an image of philosophy as posthumous, able to explain things only after we have experienced them. Or an image of dusk as threshold, the blue hour when light transforms itself, and other worlds become possible. The Last of the Light is a cultural companion to such notions. A cabinet of curiosities — paintings, poems, music — framed by the idea of Europe as an archipelago of regret, many of whose most vital artefacts have dealt in echo and obscure longing, translated into a feeling for light. This is a trail going back to Virgil, poet of shadows, or else starting from Christian ideas of a crepuscular fallen world.

Jonathan Steinberg

No end to the Final Solution

From our UK edition

David Cesarani, Research Professor of History at Royal Holloway University of London, died at the age of 58 on 25 October 2015. The book now appears without its author, a kind of huge mausoleum for an astonishing enterprise. Cesarani wants to change our view of the Holocaust and to close the yawning gap between popular understanding of this history and current scholarship on the subject… to challenge the traditional concepts and periodisations … the term itself. He substitutes the ‘Final Solution’ for the Holocaust, but that Nazi term has become an alternative name for the Holocaust, which remains after 900 pages entirely unchallenged.

Andrew Lycett

‘Crazy mixed-up Yid’

From our UK edition

Even David Litvinoff’s surname was a concoction. It was really Levy. Wanting something ‘more romantic’, he appropriated that of his mother’s first husband. So his elder half-brother, the respected writer Emanuel Litvinoff, informed Keiron Pim, adding that David was ‘an unfortunate character altogether’, prone to ‘inventing roles for himself that didn’t have any reality’. Yet this fantasist is the elusive figure whom Pim has endeavoured to capture in an ambitious book which seeks to resurrect an era as much as an individual.

Philip Hensher

Tawdry tales of Tinseltown

From our UK edition

This is a very odd book that Jean Stein has compiled — about the evanescent splendour of Los Angeles, which only occasionally touches on the film industry. Its setting’s most memorable landmark appears to be the name of one of its districts, written in enormous white letters on a hillside. That, and various opulent houses, preserved in one movie after another and generally concealed from public view. Stein’s subject is the failure to leave any kind of a mark — despite huge spectacle and expenditure; and witnesses are reduced to repeating over and over again,‘Well, you should have been there at the time.’ She tells five stories. The first concerns the Doheny family, whose wealth derived from Los Angeles’ main commodity before films: oil.

Thursday

Helen R Brown

A legend in her own time

From our UK edition

I usually dread the final 15 minutes of a celebrity interview: the awkward section during which the writer must steer the conversation away from the polite, mutually enjoyable discussion of whatever the star is currently promoting toward the juicy personal details that your readers really want to know and your subject really (and justifiably) wants to keep private. You sit in the consciously impersonal atmosphere of an upmarket hotel room with a total stranger, and broach topics you might spend decades dancing around with friends and family. I still have nightmares in which I blurt out lines worthy of Alan Partridge: Yes, the bass line on that track is terrifically deep isn’t it!

Rose George

Very much like a whale

From our UK edition

In principle, freediving is simple and perilous: divers take one breath, then dive as deep as they can, with no tanks or air, and come back up again. Watch a video of this — or Luc Besson’s 1988 film The Big Blue — and you have to hold your own breath, because it is beautiful, streamlined, pitiless: a human in the most powerful and unnatural element for humans. The beauty of freediving is that it does not look unnatural, but pure. What Adam Skolnick conveys in One Breath is how deceptive that is, and what a dreadful toll diving takes on the human body. He does this by telling the tale of one death, but also of the small freediving community that travels the world from one deep ocean hole to another to go as deep as possible, on one breath.

Jeremy Clarke

Tricks of the trade | 28 January 2016

From our UK edition

This book, the blurb warns us, was written by ‘an established voice in popular psychology, with a regular column on the New Yorker online’. Maria Konnikova is also the ‘bestselling author of Mastermind’, a book which explains how we can train our minds to see the world as Sherlock Holmes saw it. The Confidence Game identifies a template pattern of stages peculiar to every successful confidence trick, and devotes a chapter to each: the Put Up, the Play, the Rope, the Tale, the Convincer, the Breakdown, the Send, the Touch and the Fix. (The first chapter offers a psychological profile of ‘the Grifter’ or confidence trickster and ‘the Mark’ — his prey.

Andy Miller

Alive and kicking | 28 January 2016

From our UK edition

Four years after his death, it is still faintly surprising to recall that Christopher Hitchens is no longer resident on this Earth — or on any other sphere, if his friend Richard Dawkins is correct. A quote from Dawkins graces the cover of And Yet..., a final gathering together of Hitchens’s essays and the sequel to the bestselling anthology Arguably; he was, notes his ‘fellow horseman’, the ‘finest orator of our time’. And here is that voice again, alive, fiercely engaged with many of the same issues he left us to deal with: politics, patriotism, God or His absence, death and, inevitably, books. There was much about Hitchens that was contradictory and he knew it and embraced it in his work.

Nicholas Blincoe

A country in crisis

From our UK edition

Jack Shenker is a throwback to an older, more romantic age when foreign correspondents were angry, partisan and half-crazed with frustration at the stupidity of the powerful. He made his name in Egypt, arriving with nothing more than a desire to be a reporter. As the revolution began, he moved to Tahrir Square and started to publish stories in the Guardian. He soon began to win awards, notably for a piece on the deaths of African migrants in the Mediterranean. He has continued to report around the world, but his first love remains Cairo. The Egyptians, his first book, is fuelled by anger and frustration.

Richard Walker

Poverty + anarchy + drug dollars = Mexico

From our UK edition

You may not have heard of the Maras. Or Barrio 18. Or the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, or the Zatas, or the Knights Templar, or the Shower Posse. But you should have heard about them, says Ioan Grillo in his new book about transnational drug and crime gangs, because any one of them may have played a profitable and blood-drenched role in bringing you not only your weekend baggie of recreational powder, but also the gold in your earring, the lime in your gin and tonic, the avocado in your salad and even the steel in your Volvo. These ‘gangster warlords’ are the new century’s international mafias. They originate in Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean, although now they have trading subsidiaries everywhere from Bombay to Brixton.

Aidan Hartley

Not so happy valley

From our UK edition

Simon Barnes opens with a presumably true idea, that we are all in search of our own versions of paradise — a special place presented here as the sacred ‘combe’ of the title, being a word with Celtic origins that describes a steep hollow or hidden valley. These paradises might be real or imagined, exist only in memory, or live in fiction like Narnia or Robin Hood’s forest; they can be unattainable, beyond reach, or ruined, like Eden. His point, frequently stated, is that we are always on a quest for them, and need them. The particular combe of this book is not on the edge of Dartmoor but in the national parklands of Zambia’s Luangwa river valley.

Adam Zamoyski

Autocracy tempered by strangulation

From our UK edition

‘It was hard to be a tsar,’ Simon Sebag Montefiore writes in his opening sentence, and what follows fully bears this out. In his thought-provoking introduction, he stresses the unique nature of Russian autocracy and its perverse contradictions; the tsar was absolute ruler, yet he was bound by a tangle of restrictions. His subjects were prepared to accept his tyranny and any cruelty its exercise required, but claimed the right to punish him if he failed to provide strong leadership. The system was never meant to give one person tyrannical powers over everyone else. Nor was it intended to work for the greatest good of the greatest number.

Thursday

Josephine Livingstone

The medium is the message

From our UK edition

Molly Crabapple is an American artist and Drawing Blood is the story of her life. That life has only been going on since 1983, but despite its author’s relative youth Drawing Blood is a valuable political document. It tells of a life lived in struggle — against the prospect of going dead broke, against gross misogyny within the arts and against sex workers, against the obscene wealth splattering the fine art business — redeemed by intoxicating levels of exposure, then finally reoriented by a new political consciousness. Crabapple describes an artistic childhood followed by a pretentious adolescence spent performance-reading Nietzsche and hating everybody. Bored of America, the teenage Crabapple goes on holiday to Paris and Turkey.

Mark Mason

Girl about town

From our UK edition

The old ditty got it wrong: it should have been ‘Maybe it’s because I’m not a Londoner that I love London so’. The capital’s biggest fans, I tend to find, are those who weren’t born there, and Emily Chappell is yet another example. Originally from Wales, she has written more than just an engaging account of her work as a London cycle courier: she has chronicled the way in which the capital provides a home for those who don’t fit in elsewhere. The job itself is a perfect fit for a restless soul: Chappell describes the sweet spot where my body became so attuned to the bike and road that all resistance seemed to melt away … experiencing a strange sense of stillness, as though I had gone so far into motion that I had reached its centre.

Horatio Clare

Drying out in the Orkneys

From our UK edition

‘If I were to go mad,’ Amy Liptrot writes in her memoir of alcoholism and the Orkneys, ‘It would come as no surprise at all.’ One surprise of this book is its sanity, which is remarkable, given Liptrot’s beginnings. We open, unforgettably, with her parents passing each other on an island runway. Her mother is being flown home from hospital, holding the newborn Amy; her father, in the grip of a manic episode and a strait jacket, is heading the other way. Liptrot recalls another fit which drove him to smash all the windows of the family farm and hide with her, aged 11, from the police and doctors. ‘As his sedatives kicked in I crouched with my father in a corner of my bedroom, sharing a banana. “You are my girl,” he said.

Andrew Lycett

Age cannot wither her

From our UK edition

There’s something reassuring about 98-year-old Diana Athill. She’s stately and well-ordered, like the gardens at Ditchingham Hall in Norfolk, her grandparents’ Georgian house where she spent long periods of her childhood. Yes, she really is of that class, though she doesn’t trumpet it (she was presented at court in the brief reign of King Edward VIII) and, as is well known, she is of more than a certain age — born in 1917, towards the end of the first world war but, in social terms, a throwback to the Edwardian era, and half a decade before the publication of Ulysses and The Waste Land signalled the arrival of Modernism. One of the ten essays in this delightful collection is about her attitude to clothes.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

One holy mess

From our UK edition

This novel, John Irving’s 14th, took the sheen off my Christmas, and here are the reasons.   The comments on the back of the book (‘Irving is the wisest, most anguished and funniest novelist of his generation’ — Chicago Sun Times) made me feel lonely. He might have been wise, anguished and funny in The World According to Garp, 33 years ago. But never once in these 458 pages did I laugh, sympathise, or glean an ounce of wisdom. Instead, I lost confidence that reading novels could ever be a pleasure.   Take the main character, Juan Diego, a ‘dump kid’ growing up on one of the vast rubbish dumps on the edge of Oaxaca (‘Wahaca’). I enjoy reading about a dump as much as the next person, so was hopeful.

Mark Cocker

Tracking the super cats

From our UK edition

Of all charismatic animals, tigers are surely the most filmed, televised, documented, noisily cherished and, paradoxically, the most persecuted on Earth. It is also probably the one wild mammal more people wish to see than any other. In Asia, images of striped cats are indivisible from the modern tourist industries of several countries, especially India and Nepal. Yet this is not the case for the most impressive of all tiger populations, which is the race found in Siberia. Just to give you a sense of its stature: most Bengal tigers weigh about 150kg, but this relative from south-easternmost Russia can be more than twice as heavy. The Korean author of this extraordinary book describes a moment when he investigates the claw marks left by one of these super cats, a male called Khajain.

Anna Aslanyan

Revolution now and then

From our UK edition

Maxim Gorky was trumpeted as ‘the great proletarian writer’ by Soviet critics, who considered his novel The Mother one of the most significant books of the 20th century. Completed in 1906, after Gorky had already been recognised internationally, it is based on the events of 1902, when the workers of Sormovo, a factory settlement near Gorky’s native city of Nizhny Novgorod, held what we’d now call a ‘mass anti-capitalist protest’. The demonstration was brutally dispersed and, after a trial that stirred Russia, six of its organisers were sentenced to life in exile. The October Revolution was still 15 years away. The book starts with a description of the settlement’s bleak life, filled with hard work and hard drinking.

Caroline Moore

A pitiful wreck

From our UK edition

When I look at the black-and-white photograph of Julian Barnes on the flap of his latest book, the voice of Kenneth Clark floats up from memories of the black-and-white television of my childhood: ‘He is smiling — the smile of reason.’ Supremely ‘civilised’, thin-lipped, faintly superior, temperamentally given to aphorism, it is no surprise to discover that Julian Barnes is a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Yet Barnes in his fiction is unlike the simplified Voltaire of Clark’s Civilisation. His novels never proclaim the triumph of reason: instead, they explore the dark and disruptive, uncivilised emotions on the edge of words — love, certainly, but also jealousy, paranoia, inconsolable grief and the fear of dying.