Nostalgia

This terse, unsparing novel can be summed up thus: after nearly a decade’s absence, the successful designer Gabriele Bilancini returns home to suburban Rome, where he wrestles with an identity crisis. His family and friends – his intimates before he moved to Milan and raced up the social ladder – feel like shameful reminders of his proletarian origins, which he keeps hidden – in ‘the way you hide a sin’ –  from the Milanese élite he is anxious to fit in with. In Milan, where he works and lives with his girlfriend Camilla, the daughter of his mentor, the celebrity designer Franco Zardi, Gabriele dresses smartly, limits lunch to ‘a salad with full protein’ and purges his speech of any signs of his unsophisticated upbringing.

Geoff Dyer, eh? Geoff Bloody Dyer – without doubt one of contemporary Eng. Lit.’s most successful, intellectually playful and stylistically distinctive voices. His extraordinary oeuvre spans fiction, non-fiction, memoir, criticism and genre-defying hybrids, often likened – I don’t know by who, but by me at least now – to greats such as W.G. Sebald or Roland Barthes. Dyer expertly navigates the tricky territory between high culture and everyday experience, balancing erudition with comic digression in books ranging from Out of Sheer Rage (a hilarious study of not writing a book about D.H.

In 2021, the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature made Abdulrazak Gurnah the world’s second-best-known Zanzibari – after a certain Farrokh Bulsara, aka Freddie Mercury. Forgive the flippant comparison, but the pop world’s perplexity over Queen’s vocalist’s origins feels germane to the quest for a coherent self and story undertaken by the Nobel laureate’s chief characters. Born in 1948, in what was still the ancient, British-protected sultanate of Zanzibar, Gurnah has, over 11 novels, done more than explore ‘the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents’ (as the Nobel citation primly put it). His fiction shows that the shocks of power and history can make an exile of anyone, even in our home and in our skin.

There’s only one Cincinnatus in the Cotswolds, and it’s not Boris Johnson. Over the Rainbow tells the story of how, once again, Alex James was torn from his life in a very big house in the country to fulfil his national duty to play bass with Blur. The tale comes in the form of a diary, like Brian Eno’s wonderful A Year with Swollen Appendices, except that this is a year with inflated egos. To make sure our sympathies are in the right place, it begins with a preamble at the end of December 2022, during which the author attends a series of parties, each more wearisomely smug than the last. Then he sets up the stakes of the plot.

Pickled fish. Lemon tea. Cucumber. Doner kebab. Stewed beef noodles. Salted egg. Soft shell crab. Coney island mustard. Smoked gouda. Hamburger seasoning. Honey butter. Roasted garlic oyster. Spicy crayfish. Finger-licking braised pork. Sesame sauce hotpot. Rose petal. Numb and spicy hotpot. Roasted fish. Blueberry. The world of crisps has changed almost unrecognisably since the snack was first commercially produced in the early 20th century. Now the possibilities are enough to make the head spin. In Crunch, Natalie Whittle takes us on a whistlestop tour of the flavours we can now find across the world. The mind-boggling list gives an idea of the scope of this seemingly simple snack that goes far beyond the humble cheese and onion.

Sally Bayley’s The Green Lady is a beguiling, experimental mixture of biography, fiction and family history. In her excellent memoir Girl with Dove (2018), she wrote about her neglected childhood in the coastal Sussex town of Littlehampton. Here she returns to the same locality, but considers her forebears, embroidering episodes from her own rackety childhood into the lives of her ancestors and local people. The title refers to a hostel on the corner of the lane where Bayley grew up. Its owner, Mary Neal, opened it up to factory girls from London. This is the central image of the book, encapsulating themes of wealth and poverty, town and country, the limitations placed on women throughout the 20th century, and how they worked and cared for each other, or didn’t.

Imagine a new take on the Greek myth of Pygmalion. A love-shy artist makes a woman out of marble who is so beautiful that he falls for her and prays that she will come to life. For a moment he thinks his wish will be granted, but it is only his imagination. Now, in his sadness, he feels as if he himself is turning to stone. This, in a sense, has been the story of the Greek nation since, two centuries ago, a gang of brigands and diplomats took up arms to breathe life into the Parthenon marbles and revive the glory that was Greece. Thus began the phenomenally bloody Greek War of Independence, which brought an end to the centuries-long Ottoman occupation. Yet even at the start, the dream was as chaotic as its realisation.

At first glance, nostalgia does not seem like a subject much suited to exploration via the medium of the pop song; after all, this is the topic which inspired, at least in part, Ulysses and A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, two of the greatest and longest novels of the 20th century. What can one say in three minutes that hasn’t already been said in six volumes?On the one hand, we have such warnings from history as ‘Those Were the Days’ by Mary Hopkin or Terry Jacks’s implacably awful ‘Seasons in the Sun’, a rendition of Jacques Brel’s ‘Le Moribond’ which loses not just something but everything in translation.