Culture

My cat can smell depression. Another family cat could smell my stepfather’s dementia. They both became more affectionate and tactile: the dementia-smelling cat would gently paw my stepfather, when he hadn’t even liked her when he had been well. My cat comes in close when my mood is darker. Perhaps both cats were using other cues, but I’m convinced it was smell. Up until the 18th century, doctors relied for diagnoses on smell as much as anything else For something that Jonas Olofsson calls ‘the easiest and most natural thing in the world’, smell is satisfyingly complicated. When it comes to humans’ ability to smell, as Olofsson persuades us in this captivating book, it has also been profoundly neglected. This wasn’t always the case.

Winston Churchill hoped and expected his autobiography, My Early Life, to be read as much as literature as history, and also as an adventure story. He dedicated it ‘To a New Generation’, and it was especially intended to inspire people in their early twenties. ‘Twenty to 25, those are the years,’ he wrote. ‘Don’t be content with things as they are.’  Aged 56, Churchill was singularly discontented with things as they were. He was out of office and out of favour with his party, and had already entered his ‘wilderness years’.

Maeve Brennan (1917-93) was a supremely gifted Irish/American writer, whose work is periodically rediscovered, only to vanish again. It’s as if her literary reputation (she has been compared with Joyce, Flaubert and Chekhov among others) won’t stay fixed and is as homeless as she herself became. Arriving home to Dublin, Anastasia expects a warm welcome – only to be steadily spurned by her grandmother Aged 32, she secured a job at the New Yorker, contributing sardonic observations of city life as well as wry, melancholy short stories, part-fiction, part-memoir. The Visitor, her only novella, written in her late twenties when she was working as a journalist in Manhattan, remained unpublished in her lifetime.

Is this what it felt like in the months before August 1914? Or during the years leading up to September 1939? The discussion around artificial intelligence produces a deep foreboding that we are in the grip of forces largely beyond our control. Are we sleepwalking towards disaster? That is the feeling I have after reading Genesis, a collaboration by Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, Craig Mundie, the former chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft, and Henry Kissinger, who died, aged 100, soon after completing this book. They have crafted a holistic analysis of the social, political, psychological and even spiritual impacts that a superior machine intelligence would have for humanity.  We are broadly familiar with AI’s current and future benefits.

This multitudinous chronicle is not the story of the folk music revival. Rather, it’s not only the story of the folk scene in Greenwich Village from the late 1950s through the early 1980s. Ambitiously, sometimes overwhelmingly, but always fascinatingly, David Browne – a senior editor at Rolling Stone – composes his book of interconnected stories stemming from jazz, blues, folk, folk-rock and all the complementing, competing musical genres that could define what’s been played in the basement nightclubs and coffee houses in this small area of New York City since the early 20th century. He takes his title from the talkin’ blues, the direct ancestor of rap, and he is, like the writers of those blues, a born storyteller.

I suspect Adam LeBor and his publishers must have struggled to come up with the title The Last Days of Budapest: Spies, Nazis, Rescuers and Resistance, 1940-1945. The book certainly does what it says on the cover, but its pages contain other Magyar-themed subjects. We are offered a wide-ranging reflection on Hungary in the first half of the 20th century, from the harsh measures of the 1920 Trianon treaty to the devastating arrival of the Soviet army in Budapest in 1944. LeBor switches between an Olympian view of European geopolitics, trawling diplomatic archives and political memoirs and focusing on individuals – Hungarian aristocrats, Zionists and nightclub singers – to show how history felt on the ground. He is particularly concerned with the fate of Hungarian Jewry.

In 1948, Natalia Ginzburg, then an editor at the Italian publishing house Einaudi, received an 800-page brick of a manuscript from an acquaintance, Elsa Morante. Ginzburg read it in one sitting and declared Morante was going to be ‘the greatest writer of the century’. More recently, Elena Ferrante credited Morante with showing her ‘what literature can be’. The book that produced such praise – Italo Calvino called it ‘a serious novel, full of living human beings’ – has gone by different names in English: House of Liars or, in this new edition published by Penguin Classics and NYRB Books, Lies and Sorcery.

Alexander Pushkin was brought to ruin by his letters more than once. When the Russian postal police intercepted a letter suggesting that atheism was ‘the most plausible’ philosophy, he was exiled to his mother’s bleak estate in the rural north-west. But his own temper was far more dangerous. In the autumn of 1836, he received a series of anonymous letters taunting him about his coquettish wife’s affair with George-Charles d’Anthès-Heeckeren, a French officer and the adopted son of the Dutch ambassador. Pushkin, imagining the ambassador himself had written them, fired off a furious letter of accusation. He and d’Anthès-Heeckeren duelled the next day, and Pushkin was fatally shot. Aged just 37, the most famous poet in Russia had thrown his life away on a few scribbled taunts.

‘We don’t want a James Bond adventure here,’ warns a jumpy spymaster as he grapples with an anti-state conspiracy in Oromay. Among other strands, that’s precisely what this fabled Ethiopian novel of 1983 delivers. Which is remarkable, given that Baalu Girma’s semi-autobiographical thriller of rebellion and repression, love and war, has been translated from Amharic. The ancient Semitic tongue of Ethiopia served as that nation’s official language long before English came to rule at court, and in courts. Girma was both a journalist and a novelist, educated in the US and an editor of English-language magazines in Addis Ababa. He evidently relished the various genres adroitly mined in Oromay.