Books Archives

Across the literary pages | 20 February 2012

Colm Tóibín has a new book out this Thursday, New Ways to Kill Your Mother — a collection of essays examining how writers and their families relate to each other. Tóibín introduced the essays in Saturday’s Guardian, and was interviewed by the Times’ Erica Wagner (£): 'As with his memoir, in which what is left out is as vital as what is put in, these essays are remarkable for looking at the personal, familial relationships of writers while always, somehow, allowing them the freedom to be artists. Tóibín will not discuss his personal life. When I remark that he has always resisted dealing with homosexuality in his work, he says quickly: “I’m resisting it again now.

18 February 2012

Kate Chisholm

The making of the modern metropolis

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Why in 1737 did Dr Johnson choose to leave his home in Lichfield in the Midlands and travel to London to make a fresh start as a writer, asks Jerry White in his encyclopaedic portrait of the 18th-century capital. It’s a good question. London was dangerous, it was dirty, you could die of ague in a matter of hours, be robbed, crushed to death by the mob, thrown into jail for unpaid debts, and, no matter whether you were rich, poor or of the middling sort, suffer the scourge of bed bugs through every waking hour. To live comfortably (without domestic cares) you needed to earn enough money to employ at least three manservants and four women, reckons White, which would have set you back some 75 guineas a year.

Molly Guinness

Ecoutez bien!

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The French make it look easy: small babies sleep through the night, toddlers calmly eat four-course lunches, well-dressed mothers chat on the edge of the playground rather than running around after their children, and they hardly ever shout. Pamela Druckerman left New York for Paris and soon found herself with an English husband and several children. While her daughter was throwing food around a restaurant, French children of the same age would be enjoying the cheese course. Druckerman embarked on a painstaking study of parenting à la française. The result is amusing, helpful and charmingly self-effacing. Druckerman was disappointed when she found out that getting pregnant in Paris does not give you carte blanche to eat cheesecake and bond with strangers.

Olivia Glazebrook

Winter wonderland | 18 February 2012

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Jack and Mabel move to Alaska to try to separate themselves from a tragedy — the loss of their only baby — that has frozen the core of their relationship. They intend to establish a homestead in the wilderness, but it is 1920 and they are middle-aged, friendless and from ‘back east’ — unprepared and ill-equipped for the backbreaking work and unspeakable loneliness of pioneer life. By the middle of their second winter the climate, isolation and sorrow of their situation seem to have got the better of them; at the opening of The Snow Child we find them at the end of their wits and their resources. During a singular moment’s lightheartedness after a snowfall the desperate couple builds a snow child beside their house and dresses it in hat and scarf.

David Crane

If only …

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In the early summer of 1910, a naval officer, bound for the Antarctic, paid a visit to the office of Thomas Marlowe, the editor of the Daily Mail. He had come in search of some badly needed funds for his expedition, but just as he was leaving he paused to ask Marlowe when he thought war with Germany would break out. ‘I can only tell you,’ came the reply, ‘that there is a well-informed belief that Germany will be ready to strike in the summer of 1914 and it is thought that she may do so.’ The officer mulled this over, doing his calculations. ‘The summer of 1914 will suit me very well,’ he said, ‘By that time I shall be entitled to command a battle cruiser of the Invincible class.

Mark Mason

Robot on the loose

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In December 2005, a passenger on an early-morning flight from Dallas to Las Vegas fell asleep. Woken by a steward when the plane touched down, the man wearily disembarked and took a connecting flight to San Francisco. It was only there that he realised he’d forgotten an item of hand luggage on the first flight. Despite heroic attempts to retrieve it, the item was never seen again. This is a pity. The item was the head of Philip K. Dick. Not his real head, of course. That had been cremated, along with the rest of the science fiction writer, in 1982, shortly before the release of Blade Runner, the film based on his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The head was part of a robotic replica of Dick (and yes, its creators did toy, briefly, with calling it the Dick Head).

James Walton

Many parts of man

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In some ways, you’ve got to hand it to Craig Raine. Two years ago, after a distinguished career as a poet and all-round man of letters, he published his first novel — and received a series of reviews that, as Woody Allen once put it, read like a Tibetan Book of the Dead. According to virtually all of them, Heartbreak was fragmented, name-dropping, pretentious, and not really a novel anyway: more a loose collection of thoughts, revealing an alarming obsession with sexual organs. But with The Divine Comedy, Raine responds with almost heroic defiance. If you felt like that about the last book, it seems to shout, try this one for size. In Heartbreak, for instance, the fragments were comparatively chunky, even featuring some recognisably extended narrative.

Adam Marsjones

Loves, hates and unfulfilled desires

Montaigne, who more or less invented the discursive essay, had a method which was highly unmethodical: ‘All arguments are alike fertile to me. I take them upon any trifle . . . Let me begin with that likes me best, for all matters are linked one to another.’ Geoff Dyer could say very much the same thing, and it follows that Zona, though nominally a book about Tarkovsky’s maddening 1979 masterpiece Stalker, goes off in any number of directions. There are other ways of describing a circle than setting out to draw all its tangents, but that is Dyer’s preference. If the style of approach hasn’t changed, then the cultural context certainly has.

Jason Goodwin

Saviours of the sea

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The last time we went out for lobster in Lyme Bay we found a dogfish in the creel. A type of shark that roamed the seas before dinosaurs existed, a dogfish won’t slice your leg off the way a Great White might, but it is very scratchy to hold onto, thanks to its denticles, the teeth that cover its entire body (Speedo, the swimsuit company, is trying to imitate its streamlining qualities). Ours was about two foot long and snappy, with a wide rictus mouth, and it rubbed us raw thrashing about before we dropped it back in the water. While its 400-million- year-old contemporaries are embedded in the Jurassic cliffs where Mary Anning found ichthyosaurs, dogfish can still be sampled in fish and chip shops as rock salmon, or huss.

Ian Thomson

Bookends: A network of kidney-nappers

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Raylan Givens, an ace detective in the Raymond Chandler mould, has encountered just about every shakedown artist and palooka in his native East Kentucky. His creator, Elmore Leonard, is a maestro of American noir; Raylan (Weidenfeld, £18.99), his latest thriller, presents a familiar impasto of choppy, street-savvy slang and hip-jive patter that verges on a kind of poetry. Typically, Raylan charts a murky underworld where criminals are in cahoots with politicians, and where murder is a consequence of this corruption. In his curl-toed cowboy boots, Federal Marshal Givens is summoned to investigate a case of trafficking in human body-parts. A man has been found moribund in a bathtub with his kidneys apparently removed by surgery.

17 February 2012

David Blackburn

Interview: Saul David’s greatest British generals

Who is Britain’s greatest ever general? The BBC and the National Army Museum put the question to the public at the end of last year. The public declared the Duke of Wellington Britain’s best, together with William Slim. Professor Saul David is not so sure. His latest book, All The King’s Men: The British soldier from the Restoration to Waterloo, sketches the beginnings of a revision of Wellington. I asked him about this rather bold move. ‘I certainly did not set out writing the rather large section [in the book] on Wellington to bash him, but the more detail I got into about his career and how he reacted to certain situations, the more convinced I thought that he has been slightly overrated by historians.

David Blackburn

The art of fiction: Wrongful arrest

A publishing bidding war began the moment that Amanda Knox walked free. Photogenic, sexually adventurous, naive, wrongfully imprisoned — it’s guaranteed to be a blockbuster to match The Count of Montecristo and The Shawshank Redemption, only its contents will be factual. The book was bought last night by Harper Collins for $4 million. First-hand accounts of wrongful imprisonment are quite rare, especially when one considers how much coverage miscarriages of justice receive in the press. The most famous book of the genre is Papillon, published by Henri Charrière in 1969.

16 February 2012

David Blackburn

The turbulent priest | 16 February 2012

The Queen rarely intervenes in public life. It is a mark of the vehemence of the recent attacks on the Church of England that she has leapt to its defence, characterising it as the guardian of people of all faiths and none. The storm of words between secularists and establishmentarians will intensify tomorrow when the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, publishes his defence of faith, We Don’t Do God: The Marginalisation of Public Faith. It’s a strident book , especially as Carey was more ridiculed than revered as a liberal primate.

Emily Rhodes

Inside Books: Special bookshops

Chances are you’ve already seen this incredible round-up of the ten most beautiful bookshops in the world. This recent post on hip US blog Flavorwire has enjoyed remarkable success, inspiring several articles and a huge amount of praise and discussion in various forums worldwide. Over here in Britain, the Guardian’s article about it received nearly 200 comments. If you’ve not yet looked at the photos, you’re in for a treat. These bookshops are beautiful, breathtaking, almost miraculous places. And the astonishing amount of buzz created around the post reassures me that I’m not alone in thinking this. Evidently, I’m just one of several thousand bookshop-lovers.

David Blackburn

A cruel wilderness

I should not like this book, but I do. Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child has an unpromising start. Mabel, a nervy wreck of a woman, decides that her loveless life is not worth living. She strides out into the Alaskan wastes seeking a quiet death. It is a cliché worn thin by bad television drama, and it gets worse. Mabel fails to die, of course, and she returns to the log cabin which she shares — ‘live together’ would connote more intimacy than exists between them — with her withered husband, Jack. They then co-exist in silence for the next 50 pages. It was a slog for them; and it was a slog for me. The year is 1920, or thereabouts, and Jack and Mabel have recently moved to Alaska in search of solace after the still-birth of a child.

15 February 2012

Fleur Macdonald

Shelf Life: Mary Quant

This week's Shelf Lifer, Mary Quant (pictured here in 1960s), invented both the mini-skirt and hot pants. If that weren't enough, she later claimed to have invented the duvet cover. She tells us which part of the Bible she would take into solitary confinement and which character in Little Women gets her going. Her autobiography is out tomorrow. 1) As a child what did you read under the covers? Enid Blyton – My father disapproved as it was fashionably thought to be bad English. 2) Has a book ever made you cry and if so which one? Many books and most of all those by Amelia Ann Stiggins. 3) You are about to be put in solitary confinement for a year and allowed to take three books. What would you choose?

David Blackburn

The problems with prizes

Inspired by Tessa Hadley’s point about the importance of literary prizes, and itched by guilt at not have given some of them due attention, I did some research. It seems that all must have prizes. There are numerous literary awards in Britain. The Society of Authors offers 9. English Pen runs 4. The Authors’ Club has 3. While Commonwealth Writers limits itself to 2. Then there are the host of individual prizes: the two James Tait Black awards, the Galaxies, the Costas, the Duff Cooper, the Hawthornden etc., etc., etc. Tessa Hadley convinces of the need to recognise short stories — and that existing short fiction prizes are inadequate. But the odds are against a new prize being firmly established on such overpopulated ground.

14 February 2012

Tessa Hadley

Short stories deserve a prize

Writers have to be careful of prizes — careful of thinking about them, or not thinking about them. Sitting down to write, one needs one’s head clear of all the apparatus of vanity and status anxiety and self-doubt that may clutter it the rest of the time. No one who’s any good puts words on the page to win prizes: good writers aim at something much bigger and more difficult. And yet prizes do change the literary landscape — they draw writing habits and patterns and fashions inexorably after them. It goes without saying that they are a bit of a blunt instrument: getting it right sometimes, wrong sometimes, not fine-tuned to the taste of every discriminating reader. But they help sell books, and we all need books sold.

David Blackburn

Looking at love

This blog believes that Valentine’s Day should be abolished, so prepare for disappointment if you’re looking for praise of Elizabeth Barrett-Browning's sugared bleats. If you haven’t read it yet, Tessa Hadley’s short story collection, Married Love, is beguiling. Each story presents a stereotype of love, delves into it and turns out a fresh perspective. The book begins with precious student Lottie ruining the family breakfast by announcing her engagement to her hoary tutor — the soon-to-be-septuagenarian, Edgar.

13 February 2012

David Blackburn

Back again, old sport

Gatsby’s back. A film adaptation of F Scott Fitzgerald’s enduring book will released later this year, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan. Why now? Asks Philip Hensher in today’s Telegraph, a question he easily answers: ‘It’s just the novel for us. Its world reflects on bubbles and gaudy display, and people whose magnificent social position conceals an obscure history. You don’t have to look far to find Gatsby-like figures in London today. Would a modern-day Gatsby be a property developer, selling glass-walled penthouses for tens of millions? Or would a modern-day Gatsby be a Russian oligarch, with origins lost in some Siberian village and sinister staff patrolling the outer rim of the vast Home Counties estate?

Jacques Testard

Master of his brief

What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank is Nathan Englander’s third book since his unanimously praised 1999 debut collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges. With this latest collection, Englander comfirms his place as a master of the short story form, staking a place for himself as an heir to the traditions of Raymond Carver — whose famous story ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love’ he pays tribute to in his title story — and of the great Jewish storytellers Isaak Babel and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Brought up in an East Coast Jewish Orthodox community, Englander turned secular while at Binghamton University in the mid-Nineties.

David Blackburn

Across the literary pages | 13 February 2012

Spring is around the corner, and new books are flying onto the shelves. The work of those Austro-Hungarians who followed in the wake of Franz Kafka is back in fashion. Stefan Zweig’s fiction is available in a new edition, as are the letters of his contemporary, Joseph Roth. A critical reappraisal of Roth is gathering pace. Writing in the pages, Philip Hensher has declared Roth’s The Radetzky March to be 'a masterpiece of controlled, worldly irony which maintains a studious detachment.

11 February 2012

Richard Davenporthines

Menace, mystery and decadence

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It is fitting that Charles Dickens’s bicentenary coincides with Lawrence Durrell’s centenary, for the two novelists have crucial resemblances: both of them are triumphant in the intensity and power of their writing, but capable of calamitous lapses of taste; both of them are riotous comedians who sometimes plunge into hopeless melodrama. It is true that Einstein’s theory of relativity, which Durrell foisted on the structure of The Alexandria Quartet (reprinted, with a new introduction by Jan Morris) has no more part in Martin Chuzzlewit than the ludicrous sexual obsessions derived from Sade and Henry Miller which sully Durrell’s plot. But Dickens in certain moods was, as Angus Wilson said of Durrell’s novels, ‘floridly vulgar’.

Rory Stewart

Real and imagined danger

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What was the Cold War? For Professor John Lewis Gaddes, it was a conflict between two incompatible systems, democracy and communism, each with a different vision of liberty and human purpose. The result was a potential third world war, in which we risked being crushed by dictators or destroyed by nuclear weapons. And the US saved us. ‘The world,’ he writes, ‘I am quite sure, is a better place for the conflict having been fought in the way that it was and won by the side that won it. For all its dangers, atrocities, costs, distraction and moral compromises, the Cold War was a necessary contest.’ Andrew Alexander disagrees. And Alexander — who has long exposed the myopia and self-deception of the establishment — should be taken seriously.

Allan Massie

Storm in a wastepaper basket

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‘It’s the revenge of Dreyfus,’ came the cry from the dock. The speaker was the veteran right-wing ideologue, Charles Maurras, found guilty of treason in 1945 for his support of the collaborationist Vichy regime. It wasn’t of course that, and yet there is a sense in which Maurras spoke the truth. The Dreyfus case had divided France half a century before Maurras was put on trial in Lyon. The division between what Piers Paul Read, in this masterly and eminently balanced account of the Affair, calls ‘the France of St Louis and the France of Voltaire’ had never been closed. The end of the Third Republic and its replacement by Vichy’s ‘Etat Français’ in 1940 represented the victory of the anti-Dreyfusards.

Charlotte Moore

Intrigue and foreboding

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In 2009, Alone in Berlin, Hans Fallada’s masterpiece about civilian resistance to Nazism, appeared in English for the first time. Now A Small Circus, Fallada’s literary breakthrough, makes its English debut. Both novels are admirably translated by Michael Hofmann. The earlier novel will be of deep interest to the many admirers of Alone in Berlin. Once again, Fallada shows an uncanny prescience in his ability to interpret contemporary political developments through the lives of ordinary Germans. A Small Circus is based on real events that took place in 1929 in Neumünster, Schleswig-Holstein, lightly fictionalised by Fallada as Altholm.

Jonathan Keates

A holy terror

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In the summer of 1520, Michelangelo Buonarotti wrote a letter of recommendation on behalf of his protégé, the painter Sebastiano del Piombo, to Cardinal Bibbiena, an influential figure at the court of Pope Leo X. The testimonial carried some weight, for Michelangelo was by now Italy’s most admired sculptor, with what are nowadays called ‘signature achievements’ such as the David, the Pietà and the Dying Slave to his credit. Seven years earlier, what is more, he had completed the magisterial decoration of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, among the most ambitious projects in the history of painting, for Pope Julius II.

Patrick Skene-Catling

Time to sit and stare

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Hermitic, oneiric withdrawal from responsibilities and threats is the most effective way of alleviating the pangs of middle age, suggests Marcus Berkmann. In his fifties, he is a frank and eloquent expert on ageing, by turns indignantly curmudgeonly and philosophically resigned. He is observant and witty, but there were moments when he reminded me of complaints in Punch of neighbours who failed to return borrowed lawnmowers — perhaps my fault, rather than his. He recommends a shed of one’s own as a refuge in which to escape from stressful reality. ‘If I had a garden,’ he writes, ‘I would have a shed. In fact the main reason for getting a garden would be to get a shed.

Sam Leith

Frank exchange of views

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Solomon Kugel is morbidly obsessed with death: his own, and that of those he loves, including his wife Bree and his only son Jonah. He spends his idle hours writing down possible last words in a notebook, and contemplating the undignified and senseless extinctions that await him around every corner. His outlook is not helped by his therapist, Professor Jove, who is convinced that hope is the cause of all human suffering and works hard to extinguish it; nor by his brother-in-law, the unsubtly named evolutionary biologist Pinkus Stephenor — a professional optimist whose latest book is You’ve Got To Admit It’s Getting Better, A Little Better All The Time. (He is a best-seller; Jove can’t get his book published.