Culture

Salvador Dali’s wife Gala was born Elena Ivanova Diakonova in 1894 in Kazan, on the banks of the Volga. Her father was an abusive alcoholic who vanished when she was ten. Her mother, a midwife, moved the family to Moscow where Elena attended an exclusive school. But in 1913 she started coughing, so was sent to a Swiss sanatorium, Clavadel. There she fell in love with a fellow patient, Paul Éluard, who had just published his Premiers poèmes. They got engaged but had to wait until he turned 21 (she was 22) to marry – by which time she had adopted the name Gala. They had a daughter, Cécile, but they left her with his parents. Éluard was one of the Dadaist circle around André Breton. The big event in spring 1921 was the debut show of a German artist, Max Ernst.

Show Don’t Tell, a collection of 12 short stories by the American writer Curtis Sittenfeld, explores marriage, sex, money, racism, literature and friendship from the 1990s to the present. There is a fine line here between memoir and fiction, with many of the female protagonists being Midwestern, bookish Democrats – quite like Sittenfeld herself. In the eponymous story, Ruthie, a writer, dismisses the notion that ‘women’s fiction’ is perceived as giving off ‘the vibe of ten-year-old girls at a slumber party’. She reflects on internalised misogyny: ‘It took a long time, but eventually I stopped seeing women as inherently ridiculous.

Ceremonial cannibalism was not a European invention but a regular feature of South American societies Simon Park, who teaches Portuguese history and literature at Oxford University, aims to recast the early period of European exploration as a story of disasters rather than successes. His target is the notion that those who led the first European expeditions across the Atlantic or into the Indian Ocean were ‘heroes who pushed forward boundaries of knowledge’. An obvious case is Christopher Columbus, who refused to his dying day to recognise that he had failed to reach the outlying islands of China. He was already the butt of bitter criticism during his lifetime.

Calle Londres 38 is the address in Santiago of one of the notorious detention centres where the government of the Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet tortured and murdered its opponents after the military coup of 1973. This book is mainly about the international row that broke out between 1998 and 2000 when Pinochet, by then retired, visited London for a medical operation and a Spanish judge applied to have him extradited for trial in Spain. There is a parallel narrative about the long and ultimately unsuccessful attempts to bring to justice Walther Rauff, a former SS officer deeply involved in the early stages of the final solution in Germany, who at the end of his life served as a consultant to Pinochet’s infamous security service, the DINA.

David Sheff first met Yoko Ono in 1980 when Playboy commissioned him, then aged 24, to interview her and John Lennon. She asked him to send her his astrological and numerological charts before summoning him to the Dakota, where she and John occupied six apartments. (Elton John, a friend of theirs, wrote an excellent spoof: ‘Imagine six apartments/ It isn’t hard to do./ One is full of fur coats/ Another’s full of shoes.’) Yoko told him that his charts were good – ‘these are strong numbers’ – and that he would get on well with John. So they fixed a time to meet the next day. The interview lasted three weeks, during which Sheff went everywhere with the Lennons and got to know them and baby Sean well.

Michelle de Kretser, of a Sri Lankan family living in Australia, is an exceptional novelist – perhaps among the ten best at work in English today. She has been recognised with literary prizes, but it’s surprising that she hasn’t made quite the impact on the public she deserves. She is one of those writers who one presses upon intelligent acquaintances and whose books reward rereading. One of her regular subjects – she is a novelist of bookish, intelligent lives – is the inability of the Australian intelligentsia ever to read an Australian novel. As the author of The Life to Come, perhaps the best Australian novel since Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet, she does well to present this worrying disengagement with amusement.

The second world war was won in the cafés of central Europe – the intellectual milieu that produced Edward Teller, Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner, and before them Albert Einstein. But even though America was an alluring destination, many of the 1930s escapees from Nazism ended up in Britain. There were scientists in their number, too, but Owen Hatherley concentrates on the newcomers’ effect on how post-war Britain looked. He examines their role in photography and film; in the design of printed books; in art, especially public art; and in architecture and town planning. Perry Anderson’s 1968 essay ‘Components of the National Character’ was dismissive of the impact of the diaspora.