Culture

At the beginning of this year I underwent a complete literary detox: an absolute, cold-turkey abstention from cutting-edge fiction of every stripe. I subsisted on police procedurals and grown-up Ladybird books, and watched a lot of TV. It was tough, but you’ve got to defrag the old hard drive once in a while. And it was worth it: when this new batch of first novels was helicoptered in, I felt ready to approach the gig in a spirit of optimism and can-do. I’m not even going to rant about the tendency of publishers to overmarket new writers, to box them up, underplay their strangeness and render them safe and familiar. Love Me Back by Merritt Tierce (Little Brown, £14.99) and Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist by Sunil Yapa (Little, Brown, £12.

It is hard to explain the contents of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s vast series My Struggle because not much happens. Or rather: a lot of things almost happen. In these strange and unquantifiable books, which feel like a spiritual autobiography but read like trashy fiction, Knausgaard recounts his ambiguous relationships with his brother and parents and wives; he describes terrible-sounding meals which he cooks (he eats a lot of pasta with dubious sauces) and the rambling, incomplete conversations he has with acquaintances. He discusses books he has read and books he would like to write. He goes out, meets girls, gets drunk, feels sorry for himself, and then goes back to his desk.

It is very difficult to uncover accurate connections between ideas and events in history. A.C. Grayling is a philosopher and polemicist with a particular story to tell about the rise of freedom in the 17th century. In the introduction to his new book he writes: I hope the sketches offered here will illustrate the claim that the 17th century is truly the moment that history changed course so profoundly that everything before it is another world, and that it and the times since are our world. He replaces the conventional division of history into everything that happened before the birth of Christ and everything that has happened afterwards, with a new bifurcation: everything that happened when humans thought the world was the centre of the universe, and everything that has happened since.

When Friedrich Nietzsche was offered a professorship in classical philology at the university of Basel in 1869 he was so happy he burst into song. He was only 24 at the time — a year younger than Enoch Powell, who became a professor of Greek at the university of Sydney aged 25 — and looked forward to a brilliant academic career. Three years later, when he delivered the six lectures contained in this book, he was already showing signs of disillusionment. His teaching duties included six hours at the local gymnasium — the German equivalent of a secondary school — and he wasn’t impressed by what he found there.

The name Freya is derived from the old Norse word for ‘spouse’, perhaps Odin’s. As a goddess she is variously responsible for birth, death, war and beauty, which seems to cover a fairly wide range of human endeavour. It is a name befitting the ardent heroine of this old-fashioned novel with a distinctly contemporary bearing. An initial irritation at the use of a literary pun (the first of the three parts of the book is called ‘At Swim, Two Birds’ for no very obvious reason) and a sprinkling of period props (powdered eggs always pop up in the late 1940s) soon gives way to the pleasurable anticipation of a long tale well told.

When the German doctor and botanist Leonhard Rauwolff visited the Syrian city of Aleppo during an eccentrically Teutonic herb-hunting mission across the Middle East, he was instantly impressed by the thriving trade he encountered. It was ‘admirably great’, he wrote, ‘for great caravans of pack-horses and asses, but more camels arrive there daily from all foreign countries’. The year was 1573 but the description might have been written at any point during the past several thousand years. For Aleppo, trade and cosmopolitanism were always two sides of the same coin. They were seared into the city’s character long before the Muslim conquest of 637.