Fiction

Here surely is what Joseph Conrad meant when he wrote that above all he wanted his readers ‘to see.’ In The Post Office Girl Stefan Zweig explores the details of everyday life in language that pierces both brain and heart. Born in 1881 into a rich Austrian-Jewish family, Zweig was the embodiment of pre- and inter-war Viennese intellectual life. A biographer, essayist, memoirist, short-story writer and the author of one finished novel, Beware of Pity, he delivered the oration at Freud’s funeral. During the Thirties, Zweig wrote The Post Office Girl, originally Rausch der Verwandlung (The Intoxication of Transformation). The English title is better.

Love Stories, edited by Diana Secker Tesdell In Bed With: Unashamedly Sexy Stories by Your Favourite Women Novelists, edited by Imogen Edwards-Jones, Jessica Adams, Kathy Lette and Maggie Alderson When Kurt Vonnegut was interviewed by the Paris Review in 1977, he was asked: ‘Let’s talk about the women in your books.’ ‘There aren’t any,’ he replied. ‘No women, no love.’ He described this as ‘a mechanical problem’: I try to keep deep love out of my stories because, once that particular subject comes up, it is almost impossible to talk about anything else. Readers don’t want to hear about anything else. They go gaga about love.

In an admiring review (Spectator, 15 May, 2004) of Peter Parker’s biography of Christopher Isherwood, Philip Hensher conceded, perhaps reluctantly, that ‘Isherwood was not, in the end, a writer of the first rank’. In an admiring review (Spectator, 15 May, 2004) of Peter Parker’s biography of Christopher Isherwood, Philip Hensher conceded, perhaps reluctantly, that ‘Isherwood was not, in the end, a writer of the first rank’. This is probably true. The second half of his career, after his departure to the USA in 1939, was disappointing.

The Flying Troutmans, by Miriam Toews Suicidal single mothers, delinquent teenagers and unwashed children sound like the ingredients for a standard-issue misery memoir with an embossed, hand-scripted title and a toddler in tears on the cover. Fortunately, Miriam Toews has instead shaken them with wit, warmth and a firm pinch of absurdity, and produced a grittily sparkling cocktail of a novel. The Flying Troutmans takes a bleak premise, adds pitch-perfect, fully human characters and makes it, if not laugh-out-loud funny, at least difficult to read without a couple of sniggers per chapter. Hattie Troutman has fled to Paris to escape the emotional masochism of proximity to her disturbed and chronically depressed sister, Min.

Ruth Rendell’s Kingsmarkham series is set against the changing backdrop of a provincial town over more than 40 years. But her London-based books, though they lack recurring characters and locations, almost amount to a series in their own right. She has made the city her own, and writes with both knowledge and compassion about its streets and buildings, its transport and its shops — and above all about its inhabitants. Her latest novel, Portobello (Hutchinson, £18.99), is almost incidentally a crime story. The road of the title provides the spine of a narrative that shifts expertly between groups of characters in widely disparate social settings. An art dealer tries to conceal his pathetically plausible guilty secret from his GP fiancée.

2666, by Roberto Bolaño Not every writer would write a novel in the form of a completely invented encyclopaedia of imaginary writers and call the result Nazi Literature in the Americas. Not everyone, either, would write a novel in two paragraphs, the second less than 12 words long, or produce a novel about a torturer-poet who writes his work in jet-trails in the sky. As soon as Roberto Bolaño came to the attention of the world, it was clear that, however extraordinary his work seemed in formal design and subject, he might have something even more extraordinary under wraps. After his death in 2003, word emerged from the Spanish-speaking world of a gigantic novel called 2666.

Evelyn Waugh told Nancy Mitford he was ‘surprised to find’ that Proust ‘was a mental defective. He has absolutely no sense of time.’ Evelyn Waugh told Nancy Mitford he was ‘surprised to find’ that Proust ‘was a mental defective. He has absolutely no sense of time.’ (Joke, given the novel’s title?) ‘He can’t remember anyone’s age. In the same summer as Gilberte gives him a marble and Françoise takes him to the public lavatory in the Champs Elysées, Bloch takes him to a brothel.’ Well, I can’t remember just where all this comes in A La Recherche, but suspect that either Waugh or Scott-Moncrieff, whose translation he was reading, made a confusion of tenses.

And Then There Was No One, by Gilbert Adair And Then There Was No One is a metaphysical murder mystery, a deconstructionist detective story, a post-modern puzzle — all of which could, very, very easily, become as arch and wearisome as persistent alliteration. But Gilbert Adair — though fantastically clever-clever, and horribly addicted not only to alliteration but also to puns and to literary in-jokes so self-referential that he is perpetually disappearing up his own recto (oh dear, his style is catching) — has created a hugely enjoyable entertainment. And Then There Was No One is billed as the third in Gilbert Adair’s ‘Evadne Mount Trilogy’.