Literature

In Food for Life, Tim Spector’s book on the science of eating, the author gives the chemical makeup of a mystery food, listing more than 30 scary-sounding E numbers, sugars, acids and chemicals, before revealing that it is an… apple. Sally Coulthard’s book, The Apple, shows that it’s the apple’s complexity as well as its familiarity, that makes it the ideal punchline for Spector, and, for Coulthard, a perfect vehicle to carry the history of how we grow, trade, cook and eat together and take responsibility for each other and the environment (or not).

Evie Wyld’s powerful fourth novel opens from the perspective of Max, a ghost who haunts the south London apartment where he lived with his girlfriend Hannah. A ghost story is new ground for Wyld, the multi-award-winning Anglo-Australian writer, but her signature traits are immediately evident — poetic observations of unusual details; a pervasive sense of grief and palpable trauma, leavened with a wry sense of humor (Max notes his "strong urge to file a complaint" about being a ghost); and an intricate plot that compels readers to delve into complex past events.

"Gliff" is a word which can mean "a short moment," "a wallop," and "a post-ejaculatory sex act;" to "dispel snow," "to frighten," and to "escape something quickly." It’s "really excitingly polysemous," says one of Ali Smith’s characters. It’s certainly an apt title for a book which can’t seem to define itself. At its center are two children, Briar and Rose, who have been abandoned. Their mother is absent, caring for a sick sister, and their other responsible adult leaves to find her. The children exist in a stock dystopian world (people are surveilled by CCTV cameras and zombified by screens) with a twist: they repeatedly wake up to find that a red line has been painted around their house or camper van. They are on a list of "Unverifiables.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe bears one of the most famous names in world literature, though he is largely unread by English-speakers. He is most closely associated with the novel and dramatic form, so many would be surprised to know that he primarily spoke of himself, for much of a long life that spanned from 1749 to 1832, as a scientist. He was a pioneering exponent of the science of evolution, and in two wonderful poems, The Metamorphosis of Plants and The Metamorphosis of Animals, he explored his belief that nature evolves from simpler, earlier life forms. This, rather incredibly, was seventy or eighty years before Charles Darwin began to write.

Commentary on the young Romantics can be curiously puritanical. Not on saintly John Keats, who died too young to cause any trouble. But Byron and Shelley? Beastly to women, negligent as parents, destructive as friends, oblivious to their own privilege. Feminist observers tend to resemble the English visitors to Geneva in 1816 who borrowed telescopes to spy on the renegade inhabitants of the Villa Diodati across the lake, hoping to be scandalized. A central character in the summer that saw the birth of Frankenstein was the only non-writer of the villa’s gathering, Byron’s young lover and Mary Shelley’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont.

Call it a prejudice if you like. Living in Japan in the 1970s, I had a slight aversion to a particular type of westerner. He — for it was mostly a he — usually lived in Kyoto, sometimes wore a kimono and liked to sit in ancient temples chasing after that presumably blissful moment of enlightenment, awakening, satori, or whatever one wishes to call it. These seekers were less interested in Japan as a society of human beings. They wanted to float in higher spheres. As Christopher Harding explains in The Light of Asia, the Zen adepts, the Buddhist chanters, the rock-garden worshippers, the kimonoed fools (in my no doubt blinkered eyes) were part of a long western tradition.

When the journalist Steve Paul began his biography of the writer Evan S. Connell, a young librarian was helping him access research material. She happened across a photograph, and remarked, “What a suave-looking dude.” Connell had movie-star good looks. Of his eight novels, two are now packaged as classics of American literature. This on top of a biography of Goya; a 2009 Man Booker International nomination for lifetime achievement; and a bestselling history of a battle in the Great Sioux War of 1876. Acolytes recommend his greatest book, Mrs. Bridge, with the confident smile that looks forward to welcoming another member to the exclusive band of Connellites.