Culture

The NYRB logo is now something my eye leaps to when browsing, and the publisher’s eclectic range has proved consistently rewarding. The Argentine writer Antonio di Benedetto was praised by Borges, Bolaño, Cortázar and Coetzee. He was born in 1922, on 2 November, the Day of the Dead – which he made much of – and was imprisoned and tortured in 1976-77, during Argentina’s Dirty War. His eerie fables of paranoia, impending threat and incomprehension pre-empted his experience of them. Esther Allen deserves great credit for introducing the author to an Anglophone readership. Having read her translation of Benedetto’s Zama, followed by The Silentiary, I foundthe wait for The Suicides excruciating. But it was worth it.

We know of the Durrells mainly through their own writings, outstandingly My Family and Other Animals, about their years in Corfu in the 1930s, and from the image of them created by TV and film adaptations of this work. Gerald and Lawrence were the best known members of the family, the first as a zoologist and conservationist, the second as an experimental writer. Their siblings, Margaret (Margo) and Leslie, will always be perceived through the lens Gerald turned on them in My Family – the former as a flighty eccentric, something like an extra from a Carry On film, the latter as a pantomime villain. Their mother, Louisa, was loved unreservedly by her children and comes across in My Family as a kindly eccentric.

The great parliamentary sketchwriter Quentin Letts, the Henry Lucy of our day, has described Sir Graham Brady (now Lord Brady) thus: ‘Were he a yacht, his galley would gleam, the decks would be scrubbed daily and there would be a large brass bell to summon matelots to morning parade. Commodore Brady runs a tight ship.’ After 27 years in the Commons, 14 of them as Chair of the 1922 Committee, the commodore has swapped his deck garb for ermine and written a kiss-and-tell about his political encounters with five Tory prime ministers. The 1922 Committee – the fabled men in grey suits who represent the parliamentary party’s backbenchers – is ‘the closest thing the Conservative party has to its own trade union’.

There’s only one Cincinnatus in the Cotswolds, and it’s not Boris Johnson. Over the Rainbow tells the story of how, once again, Alex James was torn from his life in a very big house in the country to fulfil his national duty to play bass with Blur. The tale comes in the form of a diary, like Brian Eno’s wonderful A Year with Swollen Appendices, except that this is a year with inflated egos. To make sure our sympathies are in the right place, it begins with a preamble at the end of December 2022, during which the author attends a series of parties, each more wearisomely smug than the last. Then he sets up the stakes of the plot.

For those of us who have long loved (or hated) Paradise Lost, this is one of those rare and refreshing books that invites us to compare our feelings with other committed readers over the centuries. The poemmay well be the only major work in the western canon that nobody can avoid for long – even if it comes down to making a decision not to read it at all, or just to give up trying. Orlando Reade argues that it may also be the most ‘revolutionary’ text commonly available in modern classrooms – written by a man who, in his time, took extreme positions on everything from divorce (he was all for it) and whether kings have a divine right to keep their heads (they don’t). John Milton read widely and lived during the most conflict-driven period of British history.

Serious books about fatherhood are hard to come by; indeed, next to distinguished literary mothers such as Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti, Jacqueline Rose, and Elena Ferrante, the male sex is beginning to look decidedly inarticulate. In his new, genre-blurring work Childish Literature, the Chilean novelist Alejandro Zambra seeks to right this imbalance. In doing so, he aims to correct the failings of prior male generations, who may have ‘tried, in their own ways, to teach us to be men’, but never quite ‘taught us to be fathers’. Before he became one of Latin America’s most inventive prose writers, Zambra was an acclaimed poet and, like many poet-novelists, he treats narrative unities with healthy suspicion.