Philosophy

People call Lars Iyer a ‘cult author,’ which is odd, because almost every paper to have reviewed him from here to Los Angeles has praised him endlessly. The ‘cult’ thing is probably down to people naturally associating innovative, serious and challenging art with the marginal. This no doubt plays up to Iyer’s own theories about the climate of contemporary literature, but the reception of these books tells quite a different story. While his manifesto claims masterpieces cannot be produced in our age, and that no contemporary literature could be as important as anything by Samuel Beckett, critics call his books masterpieces and constantly compare him to Beckett.

from Delia When winter snows upon thy golden hairs, And frost of age hath nipped thy flowers near; When dark shall seem thy day that never clears, And all lies withered that was held so dear;    Then take this picture which I here present thee, Limned with a pencil not all unworthy; Here see the gifts that God and Nature lent thee; Here read thyself, and what I suffered for thee.    This may remain thy lasting monument, Which happily posterity may cherish; These colours with thy fading are not spent; These may remain, when thou and I shall perish.    If they remain, then thou shalt live thereby;    They will remain, and so thou canst not die. Nicholas Hilliard’s miniature portraits are bewitchingly beautiful.

In his new book The Silence of Animals, the philosopher John Gray explores why human beings continue to use myth to give purpose to their lives. Drawing from the material of writers such as J.G. Ballard, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, John Ashbery, Wallace Stevens and others, Gray looks at how we can reinvent meaning in our lives through a variety of myths and different moments in history. Gray refutes that humanity is marching forward to progress, where utopian ideals of civilisation and enlightenment are the end goals. He sees human beings as incapable of moving beyond their primordial, animalistic, selfish instincts, particularly when factors beyond their control make them more fearful.

I'm conducting an experiment: Life of Pi concerns a basic metaphor about faith, how is that metaphor rendered in print and on screen? I’ve re-read the book. I’ve deliberately (at this stage) not watched Ang Lee’s film; rather, I’ve found a reviewer of the film (Jonathan Kim of the Huffington Post) who has not read the book, and then I've compared notes. Jonathan Kim has derided what he saw, at least from the perspective of the metaphor: 'Life of Pi is more about the nuts and bolts of a teenager surviving at sea and bonding with a tiger than a spiritual quest that asks hard questions about the wisdom, will, and existence of God and why he seems to enjoy inflicting so much suffering and death on unoffending humans.

Nicholson Baker is intensely interested. He looks at the world like he has never seen it before, fixating on the mundane and capitalizing upon the strange lacunae which exist between seeing and understanding. In the purist sense, his interest makes him interesting. The Way the World Works is a colourful digest of his essays, conference papers, feature articles, and observations, divided into five main sections: Life (his own, principally), Reading, Libraries and Newspapers, Technology, and War. Well over a decade’s worth of eloquent umming and ahhing is encased in a single volume, a follow-up to his first, The Size of Thoughts.

‘People begin to feel that… there are bonds of international duty binding all the nations of the earth together.’ This quotation, which resonates so clearly as yet more blood is shed in Syria, belongs to Guiseppe Mazzini, the 19th century Italian nationalist whose vision of a ‘Holy Alliance of peoples’ underscores much of Professor Mark Mazower’s Governing the World: The History of an Idea. Mazower’s book is an account of the ideas and institutions of international relations from the Concert of Vienna in 1814 to the present day United Nations. It is, then, the story of how Western hegemony has shaped the international sphere; this period of hegemony is soon to end and perhaps Mazzini’s international ambitions will die with it.

‘Should literature be political?’ Njabulo S Ndebele asked Open Book Cape Town the other day. Ndebele, a renowned academic in South Africa, has written a précis of his speech for the Guardian. He draws a distinction between political novels, which dramatise activism, and other forms of literature that ‘politicise’ by deepening awareness. His point is often sunk by his own loquacity (‘These two books [The African Child and God’s Bits of Wood] reveal the continuations between political literature and literary politics. Both achieve transcendence through art that politicises and depoliticises all at once.

In a promotional video clip, Sebastian Faulks describes his new novel, A Possible Life, as like ‘a symphony in five movements... or an album in which the tracks are separate but the whole thing adds up to more than the sum of its parts.’ The idea of the musical novel – held together by themes, motifs and echoes rather than a linear plot – has been discussed or attempted by authors from Flaubert to Kundera. So what has Faulks, with his bestseller know-how, brought to this fragile form? We are given five separate stories with a large historical and geographical range.

I have been reading a new book by Theodore Dalrymple which I highly recommend. Readers of the Spectator will need no introduction to the good doctor, his fresh prose or his startling insight. But even for people like me who read most of what Dalrymple writes, Farewell Fear contains a great collection of unfamiliar — and typically brilliant — writings. I particularly enjoyed the essay 'Of Termites and Mad Dictators'. In analysing the threats to our freedom he says: ‘It is difficult now to imagine a modern university intellectual saying something as simple and unequivocal as 'I disagree with what you say, but I defend to the death your right to say it.

The 2012 Booker Prize shortlist has been announced. The runners and riders are: Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists (Myrmidon Books) Deborah Levy, Swimming Home (And Other Stories/Faber & Faber) Hilary Mantel, Bring up the Bodies (Fourth Estate) Alison Moore, The Lighthouse (Salt) Will Self, Umbrella (Bloomsbury) Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis (Faber & Faber) The Booker longlist was ambitious, a challenge to readers that was high-brow and out of touch as the world went mad for E.L. James's easy mix of spanking and wanking. The judges have continued in this high-minded vein with the shortlist, self-consciously so.

Only America, a friend of mine once insisted, could produce the New Criterion. This friend happened to be American, but his point stands nonetheless. America alone is sufficiently large, wealthy and self-confident to sustain a conservative arts journal of such consistent quality. The New Criterion is 30 years old this year. The anniversary has given its editors cause for consideration as well as celebration. They have commissioned a series of essays on the questions prompted by the unnerving nature of the future.

Richard Ford published his debut novel A Piece of My Heart in 1976.  But it was The Sportswriter — which introduced the world to Frank Bascombe, and other marginalised characters trapped on the edge of the American Dream — that distinguished Ford as a serious literary force. The two books that followed, Independence Day, which won him the Pulitzer prize in fiction, and Lay of The Land, completed the Frank Bascombe trilogy. Canada, his seventh novel, begins in Montana in 1960. It’s narrated by Dell Parsons, the son of a retired Air Force pilot, and a schoolteacher. The novel begins when Dell’s parents, Bev and Neeva, are sent to jail for robbing a bank, leaving him and his twin- sister, Berner, to fend for themselves.

Robert and Edward Skidelsky have written a new book for our times, How Much Is Enough? The Love of Money, and the Case for the Good Life, which is published today. In their own words: ‘it is the story of… how we came to be ensnared by the dream of progress with purpose, riches without end.’ But what have this father son combination been reading while penning this and their other books? The answer is: rather more than just John Maynard Keynes. Robert Skidelsky 1) What are you reading at the moment? Laurent Binet, HHhH 2) As a child, what did you read under the covers? J.B.Priestley, The Good Companions Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage 3) Has a book ever made you cry, and if so which one? As a child, F.W. Farrar, Eric, or Little by Little — uncontrollably.

At the end of Dreaming in French, in ‘A Note on Sources’, Alice Kaplan terms her narrative ‘this pièce montée’, which is the only time she neglects to supply an English translation. From a scholar of her eminence — she is a historian and critic of French modernity, a professor at Yale, and the acclaimed author of The Collaborator, The Interpreter and French Lessons — such neglect must surely be deliberate. The term was new to me, and the best I could manage was ‘assembled piece’, which in the context seems to be just a pretentious way of saying ‘book’. So I looked it up, as Kaplan probably hoped her more ignorant readers might, and I am glad I did.

In 1988 Katherine Swift took a lease on the Dower House at Morville Hall, a National Trust property in Shropshire, and created a one-and-a-half acre garden in what had been a field. In The Morville Hours (2008), she placed that garden in its landscape and wrote one of the finest books about the history, philosophy and the practice of gardening you are likely to read. She is currently working on a sequel, and The Morville Year is a very welcome interim volume, gathering the columns she wrote for The Times between 2001 and 2005.