Culture

One September, Rory MacLean’s wife, Katrin, was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Seven months later she was dead. The couple had been married for 32 years. In the wake of his wife’s death, MacLean decided to write a book about the afterlife. He had already written books about Russia and Myanmar, Berlin and Crete, but it was not clear where this journey should begin. ‘Unfortunately, few who entered heaven alive returned with a guidebook.’ Over the next five years, he travelled the globe, learning how different faiths understood the afterlife and exploring various sacred sites and religious rites. At the same time he read a wide range of mystical writers and collected insights into death from science, philosophy and the history of religion.

‘Theory was cool. Theory was French. Theory was also, strange though it might sound, sexy.’ When Emily Eakin first encountered ‘theory’ as a Harvard undergraduate in the 1980s, it marked the start of an obsession, intense as a love affair. She wasn’t the only one. For the Anglophone world, France has long represented a style of thinking that is just that: stylish. It’s not for nothing that an estimated three million American tourists flock to the boulevards of Paris each year. The place is synonymous with glamour in its most alluringly intelligent form.

Valeria Luiselli’s previous novel Lost Children Archive (2019) was a formally inventive, highly erudite reworking of the American family road trip, a bravura performance that won both the Dublin Literature Prize and the Rathbones Folio Prize. Her follow up, Beginning Middle End, is a formally inventive, highly erudite reworking of a European family road trip. The framework might be the same – even down to the inclusion of Polaroid pictures – but this is far from a pale retread of earlier themes. It is a visionary portrait of three generations of women, as well as the times in which we find ourselves. Mother and Daughter have escaped New York and are housesitting for the Pianist in Sicily.

When the American shipbuilder Enos Bright constructed the Mentor in 1807 he had no inkling of the tale it would one day tell from its watery grave. Many ships faced harrowing voyages on the high seas, but this one stood out more than others. It was an expedition that turned into a disaster that few could have foreseen. Eric Jay Dolin brings this long-forgotten story back into the public eye. The author of 17 books that have largely focused on maritime history, he is a talented researcher and natural storyteller. ‘The Mentor,’ he writes, ‘is not just another example of a shipwreck during the Age of Sail. It is one of the most complex and intriguing of such stories ever told.

The oldest surviving sentence ever written in the first alphabet is inscribed on an ivory comb found in the ruins of the Canaanite city of Lachish in what today is Israel. Dating back around 3,700 years, it offers the owner a blessing of sorts: ‘May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard.’ As Dino J. Martins points out in his marvellously entertaining tour of the netherworld of parasites, the comb (the design of which is almost indistinguishable from the plastic ones we use for the same purpose today) speaks of the depth of the human relationship with lice – creatures that have travelled with us, fed on us and multiplied with us for millions of years. Martins is the perfect guide.

Readers of Sigrid Nunez’s long-form fiction will be familiar with her concerns about storytelling: the gaps between what happened, what is remembered and what can be understood only through fictionalising. Her new collection of 13 stories, written across several decades, returns to questions of memory and the unreliability of narrative. The stories tend to have mundane settings: an insomniac awake late at night; a traveller stranded by a flight delay. Nunez is less interested in dramatic incidents than in the way a passing encounter can alter one’s understanding of life. Her narrators frequently find themselves re-evaluating past certainties or realising that events they thought they’d understood resist neat explanations.