Culture

Back in the 1980s and 1990s everyone read John Irving, or so it seemed. You had to have a copy of A Prayer for Owen Meany, The World According to Garp, The Hotel New Hampshire and The Cider House Rules. After a while even the most obtuse reader realised that a novel by John Irving was very likely to contain elements that had appeared in other John Irving novels. In fact, a friend of mine invented John Irving Bingo: cross off a box every time one of the following is mentioned: an orphanage; bears; Vienna; sex that is in some kind of way weird; and sudden acts of violence, usually brought about by ill luck or something worse.

The punk icon Patti Smith’s latest memoir stretches from 1940s Michigan to present-day Nice, weaving around and complementing her other works of autobiography in its rendering of formative scenes. These include descriptions of periods of childhood illness, displays of sibling loyalty, powerful encounters with art and poetry, attachment to beloved clothes, marriage to Fred and the deaths of people close. Smith looks ahead to a time when she and her dwindling companions are gone: ‘Write for that future, says the pen.’ Our attention is periodically drawn to the pen’s motion as it ‘scratches across the page’, conjuring a lifetime of fluctuation.

Now here’s a combination you never thought you’d see, not least because one of them is dead: Maurice Sendak and Stephen King. But there they are in Hansel and Gretel (Hodder Children’s, £20). Who knew that Sendak had illustrated Grimm, or that Mr Horror wrote fairy tales? It turns out that Sendak created sets for the Humperdinck opera, and King writes to these illustrations, which loom large and dramatic. King says that he has always been attracted both to fairy tales and to Sendak, and that one image especially that spoke to him was the infamous candy house becoming a terrible face. I thought: this is what the house really looks like, a devil sick with sin, and it only shows that face when the kids turn their backs...

At the opening of The Hour of the Predator, Giuliano da Empoli describes Spain’s conquest of the Aztec empire, its doomed ruler Moctezuma II’s response (ineffective vacillation, delaying any course of action), its consequences and its relevance to politics today. It is a striking introduction to a brief, bracing and profoundly alarming book. The author argues that an alliance of tech bros and authoritarian rulers – whom he calls modern-day Borgias – are sweeping away the rules-based international order. He sees our elected leaders as comparable to the procrastinating Aztec emperor, appeasing and hesitating as the opportunity for action passes into history. Da Empoli has a peculiar vantage point.

The fourth novel in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s spooky supernatural series differs from the others in that it is a standalone and doesn’t involve previous characters. Gone, too, are the multiple narrators; and there is only the briefest mention of a new star in the sky – which in the other three books coincided with all sorts of inexplicable occurrences. But it is no less compelling. This is the story of an arrogant young Norwegian, Kristian Hadeland, who arrives in London in 1985 to study photography at a prestigious art college. Though enthusiastic about his subject, he finds it hard to accept the constructive criticism of his lecturers.

A researcher arrives in Trieste to piece together the life of a well-known literary figure. In cafés, bookshops and hospitals he visits the friends and lovers who were part of the writer’s circle. Now dying themselves, they share echoes of a literary scene that has long since dispersed. Women recall how they were celebrated in poetry; men how their conversation sparkled. Someone remembers how the writer once asked if he might immortalise one of his witticisms in his work: ‘Forty years ago I made a joke in a bar, and he said “Oh that’s good! Will you give it to me? I want to put it in my novel.’” But the proposed novel never came. At the heart of this short, dreamlike book is a gap: the great writer around whom this literary society orbited never published anything.