Books Archives

Heart of Darkness revisited: The Dimensions of a Cave, by Greg Jackson, reviewed

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When Joseph Conrad sent his narrator into the heart of darkness, Africa was unknown territory. Revisiting the scene now, Greg Jackson dispatches his explorer to an even stranger destination: an algorithmic universe. Jackson, a Granta Best of Young American Novelists in 2017, won prizes with his story collection Prodigals. His debut novel, The Dimensions of a Cave, could hardly be better timed. New fears about AI give it disquieting relevance. Conspiracy theories mingle with deep state corruption. Gradually it grows into a Chandleresque adventure: down these mean cyber streets a man must go. Dropped into the thick of it, the reader might get the feeling of arriving late at a party where everyone else has already been introduced.

Dorian Lynskey

The data-spew about Bob Dylan never ends

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When it comes to Bob Dylan, Clinton Heylin is The Man Who Knows Too Much. Since publishing his first biography, 1991’s Behind the Shades, he has become the world’s most committed Dylanologist, doggedly untwining the facts from the artist’s self-serving fictions. When he describes Dylan’s wildly unreliable 2004 memoir Chronicles: Volume One as ‘all a put-on... all a lie’, he has the receipts. As he never tires of pointing out, scholars and diehards are in his debt, but amassing data from sessions, setlists and now 130 boxes of Dylan’s formerly private papers is not the same as telling a good story. For someone innocently hoping to understand one of the cultural giants of the last century, the reading experience might resemble drinking from a firehose.

Henry Jeffreys

The shocking truth about adulterated wine: it was delicious

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In 2012 the esoteric world of wine connoisseurship made the news when the FBI raided the Californian home of an Indonesian national called Rudy Kurniawan. They found a factory for creating fake wines with bottles, corks, labels and even recipes. According to Rebecca Gibb in Vintage Crime, Kurniawan’s counterfeit Mouton Rothschild from the legendary 1945 vintage consisted of two parts Cos d’Estournel, one part Château Palmer and one part California cabernet. Now tell me that doesn’t sound delicious. Most people don’t care about provenance as long as the wine tastes good and isn’t actually poisonous The book takes the reader on a highly entertaining tour of wine fraud from ancient times up to the present day. Gibb is a Master of Wine but wears her erudition lightly.

Caroline Moorehead

The misery of the Kindertransport children

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On the night of 9 November 1938, across Germany and Austria, Jews were attacked and their synagogues and businesses set on fire. In the days that followed Kristallnacht, a scheme was put in place to save children from Nazi persecution. Known as the Kindertransport, it would, over the following ten months, bring 10,000 children to the UK. The Kindertransport – the word refers both to the means of transport and to the overarching programme – has always been regarded as a symbol of British generosity towards those in peril and seeking asylum. But it was all rather more complicated, as Andrea Hammel sets out to show.

Philip Hensher

Why did Jon Fosse win the Nobel Prize for literature? It’s baffling.

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The Nobel Prize for Literature this year was awarded to the Norwegian novelist and playwright Jon Fosse (pictured). He has long been admired by anyone in the literary world keen to advertise their seriousness. The Canadian critic Randy Boyagoda, writing of Fosse’s Septology in the New York Times, said that he’d ‘come into awe and reverence myself for idiosyncratic forms of immense metaphysical fortitude’. The technique is to bury statements of mystic vision or horror in piles of mostly tiny and uninteresting events Fosse is published in Britain by Fitzcarraldo Editions, that elegant firm bringing all sorts of high-minded writers to our attention in matchy-matchy formats.

The Spectator

Books of the year I: a choice of reading in 2023

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Andrew Motion Something old made new: The Iliad in Emily Wilson’s muscular and moving new translation, the first by a woman, is truly what it claims to be – a version for our time (Norton, £30). And something new made immediate: Hannah Sullivan’s second collection of poems, Was It For This (Faber, £12.99), ambitiously extends the already considerable range of her first book, Three Poems. She’s the cleverest poet of her generation and also one of the most deep-feeling. Clare Mulley Vulnerability, strength and defiance this year, starting with Daniel Finkelstein’s Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad (William Collins, £25), which caught me up in its humanity as it testified to the importance of bearing witness to extremism.

24 October 2023

Scott Bradfield

In search of utopia: Chevengur, by Andrey Platonov, reviewed

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It has been a long journey into the light for the greatest Russian modernist most people have probably never heard of: Andrey Platonov. Born in 1899 in Voronezh, he started professional life as a mechanic and land-reclamation engineer, making him one of those rare writers with an affinity for both people and machines. In the mid-1920s, he was branded an ‘anarchic’ spirit by Maxim Gorky, who nevertheless admired his work. His great early novels were openly critical of the Soviet policy of ‘total collectivisation’ – which, in Platonov’s nightmare scenarios, tends to collectivise people to death.

Honor Clerk

The force of nature that drove Claude Monet

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There have been some really good biographies of artists over recent years and what distinguishes the best of them is their sense of context and a lucid prose free from the jargon of the art historian. In the end, of course, any work of art has to be able to stand by itself, but for Jackie Wullschläger her appreciation of Monet’s paintings has been immeasurably deepened by her sense of the man behind them. ‘My approach,’ she writes, ‘stems from the belief that painters transform the raw material of experience into art’, and that material, both the familiar external events and, more illuminatingly, the inner man, is what she gives us here.

Michael Arditti

Escape into the wild: Run to the Western Shore, by Tim Pears, reviewed

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Quintus, an Ephesian slave, is in attendance on his master, Sextus Julius Frontinus, the Roman governor of Britain, when Cunicatus, the chief of one of many warring tribes in ‘this hideous island at the edge of the world’, seals a marriage alliance between Frontinus and his daughter, Olwen. She, however, rejects the match, escaping from the camp at dead of night and impulsively asking Quintus to accompany her. Despite having seen a recaptured fugitive in Gaul torn apart between four horses, he agrees to go. Tim Pears’s Run to the Western Shore follows the pair as they flee through south Wales, hotly pursued by Frontinus’s legionnaires.

Dylan Neri

Now imagine a white hole – a black hole’s time-reversed twin…

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There are many ways to measure the course of human history and each will give an insight into one or more of the various qualities that have made us the most successful great ape. Every major advance, whether in war or art or literature, requires imagination, that most amazing of human capacities, and the ability to ask ‘What if?’ – to take the world from a different perspective. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the history of science. While there is an inherent provincialism in revolutions in art and literature, progress in science is universal, and moves, like Dante’s Hell, in concentric circles of ever deeper understanding.

Helen Carr

Ordinary women make just as thrilling history as great men

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In 1348, the year the Black Death reached England and devastated the country, Matilda, the wife of Robert Comberworth, attacked someone called Magota and drew blood. She was fined 3d. Agnes, the wife of William Walker, attacked William de Pudsey and was fined four times the amount. Amica, an official watch-woman tasked with guarding a fruit crop, caught a certain Cecilia stealing. These women are among the many who star in Philippa Gregory’s latest book. Post-Conquest England is well-trodden ground, but Gregory’s history is not one of great men. It is of normal women – the women of legal battles, petitions, wills and letters. Her characters farm, pray, heal the sick, revolt and go to war. They are mothers, political agents, activists and victims.

Sam Dalrymple

A Hindu Cromwell courteously decapitates hundreds of maharajas

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On 25 July 1947, in the searing heat, almost 100 princes bedecked in jewels gathered in a circular room in New Delhi. Some of them ruled over principalities of less than a square mile; others over an area larger than Korea. All of them had been Britain’s close allies for more than a century and, now that the British were leaving India, many looked forward to regaining their states’ independence. But on that fateful day, as Lord Mountbatten swaggered around in his ivory white uniform, anxious murmurs rippled through the throng. A cousin of George VI, and related to virtually every royal in Europe, the viceroy was no republican; yet he was about to set in motion one of the great revolutions in world history.

Emma Beddington

Nina Stibbe’s eye for the absurd is as sharp as ever

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Nina Stibbe is back in London. It has been 20 years since she left, and 40 years since she first arrived from Leicester to nanny, ineptly, for Mary-Kay Wilmers, the editor of the London Review of Books. Back then, she chronicled her adventures (minor car crashes; thinking Alan Bennett was in Coronation Street; inadvertently stealing Jonathan Miller’s saw) in deadpan letters to her sister Vic that became the delicious Love, Nina. This time she’s resolved to keep a diary of her year as ‘Debby’ Moggach’s lodger in a narrow Kentish Town terrace with an over-watered garden she already disapproves of.

Ruth Scurr

Was the French Revolution inevitable?

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In the middle of the 18th century, on the north side of the Palais Royal gardens in Paris, there stood a magnificent chestnut tree called the Tree of Cracow. In his presidential address to the American Historical Association in 2000, Robert Darnton explained that the name Cracow probably derived from the heated debates that took place in Paris during the War of the Polish Succession, but also from the French verb craquer: to tell dubious stories. News-mongers or nouvellistes de bouche, agents for foreign diplomats and curious members of the public gathered round the tree, which was at the heart of Paris’s news network, a nerve centre for transmitting information, gossip and rumours.

17 October 2023

Susie Mesure

The hell of the antebellum South: Let Us Descend, by Jesmyn Ward, reviewed

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Jesmyn Ward, America’s only female two-time National Book Award winner, has had more than her share of hellish experiences to fuel her literary life. Her Mississippi-based family endured Hurricane Katrina. Salvage the Bones (2011), set during the catastrophe, was Ward’s response. Her memoir, Men We Reaped (2013), tackled her grief at losing five men close to her, including her brother, who was killed, aged 19, by a drunk driver. In January 2020, Ward’s husband died of acute respiratory distress syndrome. Ward recreates the hell of the antebellum South for the ‘stolen’ people forced into chattel slavery Hell is very much the context for her fourth novel, Let Us Descend.

Clinton Heylin

Thurston Moore relives the early days of Sonic Youth

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There are a surprising number of books on or by Sonic Youth, the most important of the East Coast bands to emerge in the wake of the first wave of US punk (1974-78). An excellent Spanish biography and an Italian potted history precede the three English language bios to date, while Thurston Moore’s ex-wife Kim Gordon published her own embittered memoir (Girl in a Band) in 2015. Seems Thurston had been a very naughty boy, and she was determined to tell the world all about it. In fact he may well be the least naughty boy in the history of rock music. ‘Neither hardcore sex nor drug action figured very much in my world,’ he writes. ‘Boys have always wanted to be in rock bands to get laid, or so it’s said. But that was not a defining factor for me.

Francesca Peacock

Satirical pulp: The Possessed, by Witold Gombrowicz, reviewed

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On 1 September 1939 Germany invaded Poland. It’s hardly an event which needs its significance re-stating, but there was one outcome which has received rather less attention than the impending crisis in Europe. After the first instalments – serialised in newspapers in the summer of that year – a bizarre, flamboyant, mock-gothic novel by an unknown writer, ‘Z. Niewieski’, was forced to cease publication on 3 September. Witold Gombrowicz, the author of The Possessed and master of Polish modernism, had penned the work under a pseudonym, and, he claimed, only for money. If that distance from the book weren’t enough, he then put an ocean between himself and the manuscript.

Lee Langley

Anonymous caller: This Plague of Souls, by Mike McCormack, reviewed

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Mike McCormack is much garlanded. He won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature with his first collection of stories; the Goldsmith’s Prize followed in 2016, along with the Irish Book of the Year Award and the International Dublin Literary Award, for his novel Solar Bones. A book-length, single- sentence analysis of a man’s life, that story sprang off the page with the force of a blow. This Plague of Souls, his fifth novel, is more distanced. Not a story with a beginning, middle and end, it circles in widening gyres, swooping now and then on to a tightly focused moment as its ambiguous hero tries to make sense of an impossible situation. The basic carpentry is simple.

Leyla Sanai

The golden age of Dutch art never ceases to amaze

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This year’s Vermeer exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the Frans Hals retrospective at London’s National Gallery are testaments to the enduring appeal of the Dutch artists of the Golden Age. When the 80-year war between Spain and the Dutch Republic ended in 1648, it left the Dutch strong in military and economic terms. They founded colonies across the world. The affluence and stability provided the perfect medium for creativity. Painting flourished, and buying art was no longer the domain of the wealthiest. Benjamin Moser’s first book since winning the Pulitzer for Sontag explores this burgeoning world.

Katja Hoyer

‘The truth will make us free’: students on the march in post-war Europe

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One night in early autumn 1982, two young men roamed the streets of Lodz in Poland. It was a dark period in the country’s history – one of many. A mass movement led by the Solidarnosc trade union had recently attempted to challenge the communist regime which had kept the country under a heavy Soviet yoke, with little to offer but food shortages, economic decline and the erosion of national identity. The authorities had responded with force to the widespread strikes, declaring martial law in December 1981 and rolling tanks into cities. Protests were silenced with guns. Thousands were arrested and dozens killed. When Waldemar Fydrych and Piotr Adamcio wandered through Lodz months later, the streets were eerily quiet.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

‘We are stuck like chicken feathers to tar’: Elizabeth Taylor’s description of the fabled romance

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‘To begin at the beginning,’ intones Richard Burton with a voice like warm treacle at the start of the 1971 film Under Milk Wood. It’s hard to imagine an actor more obviously influenced by his own beginnings. The epigraph to this double biography is ‘The damp, dark prison of eternal love’, a line borrowed from Quentin Crisp. And if that’s an accurate assessment of Burton’s on-off-on-again relationship with the actress Elizabeth Taylor, it’s an even better summary of his childhood in Wales. Born Richard Walter Jenkins to a barmaid mother and a coal miner father (a ‘12-pints-a-day man’ who sometimes disappeared for weeks on end to drink and gamble), as a teenager he attempted a fresh start by moving in with a teacher named Philip Burton.

Chloë Ashby

A satire on the American art world: One Woman Show, by Christine Coulson, reviewed

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Christine Coulson worked for more than 25 years at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where she wrote hundreds of wall labels. In One Woman Show, her second novel, she tells the tragicomic life story of a Wasp-ish porcelain girl called Kitty Whitaker almost entirely in the same 75-word format as if she were an artwork. The 20th-century tale is presented as an exhibition, made possible, we’re told on the opening page, by ‘gin, taffeta and stock dividends’. It’s a wonderfully clever concept, and a book that lends itself to being read in a single sitting, during which you’ll feel the corners of your lips curl upwards again and again.

Anna Aslanyan

Wallowing in misery: Tremor, by Teju Cole, reviewed

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Tunde can’t explain why he grows addicted to screen depictions of ‘inexhaustible brutality’ The protagonist of Teju Cole’s latest novel is a composite of his earlier creations, which in their turn are partial self-portraits. An artist roaming around with his camera, Tunde photographs hedges and trinkets, contemplates colour and listens to Malian music. Having left his native Nigeria three decades earlier, aged 17, by 2020 he is settled in New England. Meanwhile, Lagos has become ‘a reality of his life so large and at the same time so intimate, so intense and so various’, a feeling that increases whenever he returns to the city in person or in his imagination.

Michael Henderson

Has Bazball rescued — or ruined — cricket?

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The date 6 June 2021 was a grim day for cricket. As the world was adjusting to life after the pandemic, a Lord’s Test with a full house felt like ‘the promised kiss of springtime’. And so it was, until the final afternoon, when New Zealand challenged England to make 273 in 75 overs. The gesture was recognised as generous by all except the faint souls in the England dressing room, rendered frit by the possibility of defeat. Thousands of spectators, bewildered by five hours of fearful prodding, withdrew their consent. Cricket has witnessed more profound changes in the past decade than in the previous 100 years With ‘the Hundred’ looming like a pirate’s galleon, caution was inexplicable.

Peter Bradshaw

The mystery of Werner Herzog

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Many movie actors are famous for their unmistakable voices – people like Sean Connery, John Wayne and Peter Lorre, who all pub comedians mimic. But how many directors are like that? Only one: the German auteur Werner Herzog, hero of the New German Cinema, who at the age of 81 has published this headspinning, free-associating memoir. Its German title, Jeder Für Sich Und Gott Gegen Alle, was also the original, anarchic title of Herzog’s 1974 film The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, based on the true story of a boy reportedly brought up in an isolated darkened cell.

10 October 2023

Roy Foster

Seamus Heaney’s letters confirm that he really was as nice as he seemed

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Seamus Heaney wrote letters everywhere – waiting for his car to be repaired at a country garage, sitting over a glass or more of Paddy late at night, and above all in aeroplanes, ‘pacing the pages against the pilot as he takes us in to Heathrow or Shannon’, as he wrote to a friend in 1995. So many eloquent missives were dashed off at high altitude that his editor suggests he might have had notepaper printed with the heading ‘EI 117’, the Aer Lingus flight between Dublin and Washington DC. This airborne activity is significant because it indicates two characteristics illuminated by Christopher Reid’s riveting collection: the pressures of life lived at an exceptional pitch of fame, and Heaney’s powerful need to keep faith with friends and fellow poets.

Brian Martin

Bribery and betrayal in Stuart England: The Winding Stair, by Jesse Norman, reviewed

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The philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon wrote: ‘All rising to great place is by a winding stair.’ This historical novel is about him and his use of it. The way up is long, intricate and difficult; downwards there is nothing to ‘slow his fall’. His antagonist in his ascent to worldly power was the lawyer Edward Coke. Bacon rose to be lord chancellor of Great Britain. Coke became attorney general under James I. Both fell from grace. It is a political story. Judging from what has been happening recently, nothing has changed. Ambition, ruthless achievement, favour, bribery, corruption and betrayal are the features of the political world. Jesse Norman’s novel is about Bacon’s political career, not about him as a natural philosopher. He is portrayed as a Vicar of Bray figure.

David Honigmann

Has crypto finally had its day?

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If you run an organisation, there are some reporters you definitely don’t want around: Ronan Farrow asking for comment; Madison Marriage or Dan McCrum with a couple of questions; Michael Wolff hanging out on a sofa taking notes. Michael Lewis is not one of those reporters. If he wants to spend time with you, you are about to be lionised as a decent person who sees just a bit more clearly than the fools who run the system of which you are a part, which will make you wildly rich (unless you’re an academic or a public servant) and famous. When Michael Lewis calls, people answer. Lewis raises enough questions for one to finish the book less sure of Bankman-Fried’s guilt than at the start When Zeke Faux calls, they often don’t.

Stephen Bayley

Is Thomas Heatherwick the best person to preach about modern architecture?

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It needs a big personality to answer a big question: why is so much new building so very bad; why are our cities so ugly? Thomas Heatherwick is that big personality. He is the Jamie Oliver of architecture and design: personable, blokeish, smart, tele-genic, extremely successful, nearly demented with ambition, and, one suspects, inclined to petulance if crossed. He is a visionary with several blind spots. To extend the Oliver comparison, there are times when Heatherwick serves up a delicious dish with his thumbs stuck in the bowl. His flair comes with flaws. As a designer, his Boris Bus for London was charming, but functional problems led to its withdrawal from service. His ‘B of the Bang’ sculpture in Manchester has been dismantled.