Culture

Patricia Highsmith was an accretion of oddities — a woman who doted on her pet snails and carried a selection of them in her handbag, who abandoned her native America for a restless life in Europe, and who turned a habitual paranoia into literature. Now, 20 years after her death, her reputation has been substantially increased by film versions of her Ripley novels and, most recently, Carol (an adaptation of The Price of Salt, her extraordinarily bold novel of a lesbian love affair). For all that, she is generally classed as a crime writer, albeit a very superior one. As one contemporary reviewer commented, ‘Patricia Highsmith is often called a mystery or crime writer, which is a bit like calling Picasso a draftsman.

'This day fucking sucks,' remark several characters over the course of Xavier Dolan’s It's Only the End of the World. It’s hard to argue with them. Recriminations, ugly behaviour and shitty attitudes are par for the course in this dysfunctional family drama. A young, gay playwright named Louis returns home after 12 years to his family to announce that he is dying, probably of AIDS, although that word is never mentioned. His emotional roller coaster of a homecoming lasts a grand total of five hours, as he tries to reconnect with his nervous, oblivious mother, the younger sister whose adolescence he missed and takes heaps of abuse from his brutish older brother.

In Timothy Garton Ash's new book Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World, the historian examines present challenges and threats to free speech. However, it's the book's final chapter -- titled 'Courage' -- which is of the most intrigue to Mr S. In the May issue of the Literary Review, Douglas Murray reviews the book. Murray recalls an incident that occurred ten years ago when Ayaan Hirsi Ali -- a vocal critic of misogyny in the Muslim world -- appeared alongside Garton Ash at an event -- after he had 'written a decidedly sniffy article about Hirsi Ali, dismissing her as, among other things, a "slightly simplistic Enlightenment fundamentalist"'. In the end, Garton Ash backed down and declared that he 'had not meant to compare Hirsi Ali to the Islamists'.

John Preston has just published a gripping account of the Jeremy Thorpe case, A Very English Scandal (Penguin). Sometimes the details make one laugh out loud or gasp with amazement at the tale of the shooting of Rinka, the Alsatian dog, and all that followed. But although I was completely carried along by the narrative, I found myself resisting the book’s implied conclusion that Thorpe’s acquittal of conspiracy to murder Norman Scott was a disgrace. Possibly I am biased, because my father worked for Thorpe over some of the period involved, writing his speeches and giving him political advice (luckily the personal and constituency sides of things never fell to him).

Whimsy, satire and deadpan humour: welcome to the world of Andrey Kurkov. If you know Kurkov’s work, The Bickford Fuse will be no surprise and need no introduction. It’s not Death and the Penguin or A Matter of Death and Life (read them first), but it’s certainly Kurkov in welcome and familiar mode. For newcomers and to summarise: he’s really a kind of Ukrainian Kurt Vonnegut, a serious writer never more serious than when he’s being funny about unfunny things, and with a whole lifetime of unfunny things to be serious about. As the second world war was to Vonnegut, so the Soviet Union is to Kurkov. If — as Oscar Wilde believed — our duty towards history is to rewrite it, then Kurkov has long been working overtime.