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At what point did the ponderous autobiography get edged out by the slinky elliptical memoir? Perhaps around the stage we all realised that, as Stephen Hough puts it, ‘a complete autobiography is usually boring or indecent. It’s the person at the dinner table who just won’t stop talking’. There’s certainly no holding forth (though perhaps just a little indecency) here.
Bret Easton Ellis’s novels were my literary gateway drug when I was young, the stylised bleakness of his debut Less Than Zero a model for my own writerly aspirations. He was a wunderkind. The fact that he’d written his first novel while still a teenager seemed incredible to me as I read and re-read it: a book with little plot but with so much life. The Shards can be usefully thought of as both a prequel to Less Than Zero and a presentation of the atmosphere and circumstances that brought that novel into being. Ellis has spent much of his career exploring the territory between fiction and autobiography. Lunar Park (2005) was a kind of faux autobiography, while Imperial Bedrooms (2010) followed the semi-autobiographical protagonist from Less Than Zero into middle age.
It is Hollywood, in perpetual summer, and Ludwig Bemelmans has driven past some unusually well-groomed eucalyptus trees for a meeting with Elsie de Wolfe, Lady Mendl, interior decorator to the stars. In her salon is a footstool that once belonged to Madame de Pompadour. Lady Mendl’s husband comes into the room and trips over the stool. ‘My God, he’s dead,’ says Lady Mendl. He isn’t, of course. He’s the classic English booby beloved by Hollywood, so is immortal. Death hangs over this book in a way I’ll return to later, but at this point it’s mainly because Lady Mendl is old, old. 80? 90? No one knows for certain. But she has a force for life which is close to insanity. Everyone here is mad in one way or another.
Marion Turner has written a superb biography of a woman who never lived. Alison, the Wife of Bath in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, is one of the most famous of all medieval women, even though she has only ever existed on the page. But Turner’s beautifully written, rewarding and thought-provoking book about this imaginary woman shows how much her literary existence has to say about actual women’s lives. The book is divided into two main sections. In the first, Turner examines four different aspects of Alison – the worker, married woman, storyteller and traveller – and expertly conceptualises the late medieval English world and its attitudes to, and treatment of, women.
Insofar as every reading of a book is a retelling of it, a writer needs a very good reason for doing a ‘contemporary retelling’ of a classic. In giving Becky Sharp the fleshed-out backstory denied her in Vanity Fair, Sarah May more than meets that requirement, though her novel still suffers by its proximity to Thackeray’s original. That shadow is particularly occluding in Becky’s early chapters, when the reader’s instinct is to look for what they know, not what is new. To speak only of the unmissable differences, then, May’s Becky is a Gen Xer, not a Georgian, an aspiring journalist, not a socialite, and her story is told in the first person, not the third, a choice that puts her at the centre of the narrative in a way she never is in Vanity Fair.
Mario Vargas Llosa wasn’t always a liberal. From his youth until his early thirties the Peruvian writer, born in 1936, was enthused by the utopian promises of socialism. He joined a communist cell at university, and in the 1950s spent half his salary on a subscription to Les Temps Modernes, the leftist journal founded by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Vargas Llosa’s world view changed radically in the late 1960s, as he watched the Cuban revolution silence local writers and put homosexuals in forced labour camps. During a visit to the USSR in 1968, he realised that had he been a Soviet citizen his disregard for authority would have condemned him to the gulag.
In January 1804 the West Indian island of Saint-Domingue became the world’s first black republic after the slaves toiling in the sugar fields rose up against their French masters and, at the end of a 13-year insurgency, proclaimed independence. Saint-Domingue was renamed Haiti (an aboriginal Taino-Arawak Indian word meaning ‘mountainous land’) and the Haitian flag created when the white band was solemnly removed from the French tricolore. Haiti’s is the only successful slave revolt in recorded human history. It was led by Toussaint Louverture, a Haitian former slave himself and emblem of slavery’s hoped-for abolition throughout the Americas. Thousands of French settler colonists were massacred during the Louverturian struggle.
Imagine a Stephen King thriller hijacked by Proust. Clammy-handed suspense, nerve-shredding tension, but related in serpentine, elegant prose, each climax held suspended – deferred gratification. What Javier Marías did for the spy story, Laurent Mauvignier does for terror. It begins quietly, with an ominous sense of something waiting to happen. An isolated hamlet in deep rural France; just three houses, one empty, one occupied by a family – Patrice, a farmer, his wife Marion and ten-year-old daughter Ida. In the third, Christine, an elderly bohemian artist, enjoys the seclusion with her dog for company. Each of these characters in turn will take up the narrative in a tortuous relay race.
In February 1939 Edouard Daladier, the French premier, told the US ambassador William Bullitt that ‘he fully expected to be betrayed by the British’, whose prime minister was ‘a desiccated stick, the King a moron and the Queen an excessively ambitious woman’. The British had become so feeble, he said, that they would betray all their friends rather than stand up to Germany and Italy. The British harboured similar views of France. Even when it came to declaring war in 1939, Chamberlain had to wait many hours for Daladier to follow his lead. Daladier then merely said: ‘We are waging war because it has been thrust on us.’ R.T.
I have to confess that this book sat on my desk for several months. The words ‘Harvard University Press’ cast a strange and unsettling spell which prevented me from even opening it. Let’s be honest: academic presses are not always synonymous with rollicking reads, nor indeed are academics. They can ask an awful lot of the general reader – that would be most of us. Given how short life is, there is no good reason why reading should be more of a pain than a pleasure. Thankfully, the spell finally wore off, which was fortunate, because this book about a book, like the book it describes, is a rare and marvellous thing.
There is a lot to like about Diane Purkiss’s English Food. It’s a hefty thing, packed full of titbits to trot out down the pub, but also a serious consideration of how English food has changed over time, and of the perils of assuming there has ever been a golden age, or even a very stable one. The layout is good, organised thematically rather than a chronologically, which saves the book from getting bogged down in repetition, and avoids the common trap of listing endless menus and foodstuffs. The best chapters are often the shortest. The one on apples includes a fascinating collection of facts, folklore and recipes, as well as a consideration of just how difficult it is to work with historic definitions. The section on codlins – a big or small apple? One that cooks to a foam?
In 1959, the public (i.e. private) schools were responsible for 55 per cent of the Oxbridge intake. By 1967 they were down to 38 per cent, with the majority of places going instead to the grammar schools. Four years later Anthony Sampson welcomed how ‘the trickle of grammar school boys to Oxbridge has turned into a flood’, adding that ‘both in intelligence and ambition they compete strongly with the public school boys’. In short, a new, largely state-funded elite was now emerging to rival the familiar products of Eton, Winchester et al.
One of the more daft but enduring spin-offs of the science fiction genre is steampunk – fiction fashioned with a retrofuturistic love of 19th-century industrial technology. Think of an ironclad of the air, shaped like a fantasy submarine, with six or more propeller engines powered by cogs and levers, funnels pumping out coal smoke from the steam turbines, windows replaced by watch dials, and hundreds of rivets holding the whole thing together. Inside would be a palm court saloon hosting a tea dance. Many of the gentlemen are garbed in comic-book versions of the army officer and entrepreneur style of British imperialism, the ladies in dark velvet, veils and stays, and an orchestra in evening dress and moustachios. Weird eyepieces, top hats and ancient firearms are omnipresent.
Jane Smiley has form with mining classics for plots. Her 1991 Pulitzer winner A Thousand Acres was based on King Lear. Boccaccio’s The Decameron and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn also inspired two of her previous 15 novels. In A Dangerous Business, which is set in a brothel in lawless 1850s California, she does something slightly different, using Edgar Allan Poe’s fictional detective C. Auguste Dupin to prompt her protagonist Eliza Cargill into action when women start disappearing from Monterrey. No one cares enough about the missing women – who, like Eliza, are prostitutes – to investigate. Monterrey has no constables, only vigilantes, who are more interested in money and feuds.
The most influential Native American visitor to Europe in colonial times was a fiction. The protagonist of L’Ingénu, Voltaire’s novel of 1767, and of a dramatisation by the sage’s acolyte Jean-François Marmontel, was the very model of a noble Huron. He fought the British with distinction, fell in love with an imprisoned French lady and assaulted the Bastille to liberate her. The strikingly prescient central event makes his story excel even the Great Cat Massacre as a prefiguration of the French Revolution. Indeed, the discovery of the natural wisdom of the savage facilitated the philosophes’ esteem for the common man. By empowering the massesthey imperilled themselves – but that is another story.
In the penultimate entry of Toby Litt’s A Writer’s Diary, an autofictional daily record of a writer named Toby Litt (which first appeared from Substack), he admits he began the project wanting to write ‘the best book that has ever been written about writing – about the physical act of writing, and the metaphysical act’. He may not have succeeded (Norman Mailer’s The Spooky Art might fit this description), but substitute the word ‘living’ for ‘writing’ and he might be closer to an apt summary. It’s an extraordinary record of life’s minutiae, oscillating from the trivial to the transcendent, often on the same page. Which isn’t to say the book doesn’t contain a treasury of wisdom about the writing life.
Edi is dying of ovarian cancer and she’s craving the lemon cake she once got from Dean & Deluca deli in New York in the mid-1990s. Her forever best friend Ash is keeping vigil by Eli’s bedside in the Graceful Shepherd Hospice in western Massachusetts, trying to track down that elusive cake and keep Edi happy and comfortable with juice, lip balm and company. She’s also ‘whoring around’ (Ash’s words) with a variety of inappropriate people: the palliative care doctor, a substitute teacher from her daughters’ old school, and Edi’s brother. Then there’s her own not-quite-ex-husband, Honey… That’s the set up for the US memoirist and journalist Catherine Newman’s first adult novel.
‘James Bond is just a piece of nonsense I dreamt up,’ the former naval intelligence officer Ian Fleming once said. ‘He’s nota Sidney Reilly you know.’ Sidney Reilly was not really Sidney Reilly either; but he was certainly a James Bond. Born Sigmund or Schlomo Rosenblum (this is a book full of caveats), he spoke possibly six languages and identified at different times as an Englishman, an Irishman, a Greek or Turkish merchant, a German machine-tool operator and a Tsarist officer. In fact he came from a Ukrainian Jewish family, but ignored his heritage as much as prevailing anti-Semitism would permit, and devoted his life to making love and money and, with only slightly greater dedication, fighting Bolshevism as an MI6 spy.
It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was the century, as the historian Kevin Sharpe wrote, summing up the Whig view, ‘in which the champions of law and liberty, property and Protestantism triumphed over absolute monarchy and popery and laid the foundations for parliamentary government’. It was a century of recurring plagues and fire and bloody civil war. It saw successive waves of witch hunts, the beginnings of the Enlightenment and the founding of the Royal Society. It saw revolution and regicide followed by restoration and revolution again.
If you read only the title of Charlie Taverner’s book Street Food you could be forgiven for assuming it was an exploration of the stalls that line the trendier streets of our cities, offering bibimbap and bao, jerk chicken and jian bing. But the author’s focus predates brightly coloured gazebo hoardings and polystyrene packaging and looks instead at the working lives of the itinerant traders who populated London before 1900, touting everything from oysters to milk, and what their work meant for a changing capital city. By placing these vendors at the centre of the story rather than as faintly comic support acts, Tavener provides something that goes beyond individual characters.
Explaining how she managed to kick her cocaine habit, the singer Fiona Apple recalled ‘one excruciating night’ she spent trapped in Quentin Tarantino’s home cinema with Paul Thomas Anderson listening to the two Hollywood directors brag competitively, and apparently indefatigably, about their professional achievements. ‘Every addict should just get locked in a private movie theatre with QT and PTA on coke, and they’ll never want to do it again,’ she informed the New Yorker some years later. I suppose that’s one accolade the pair will have to agree to share: conversation so unstimulating it undoes all the good effects of hard drugs.
In the 1964 Hammer film The Devil-Ship Pirates, a privateer of the defeated Spanish Armada escapes the English fleet and puts in for repairs at an isolated coastal village whose inhabitants have not received news of the battle’s outcome. There the Spanish convince the villagers that Spain was victorious, and so impose submission on them. Historical verisimilitude was not exactly a priority. However, two weeks after the Armada was defeated in August 1588, a printer in Seville published glad rejoicings at Spain’s victory. The problems of extended lines of communications and poor intelligence bedevilled the Spanish throughout the whole enterprise, contributing notably to their defeat. The tale of the Spanish Armada is well known.
In Jawaharlal Nehru’s final will and testament he asked for most of his ashes be taken in an aeroplane and scattered ‘over the fields where the peasants of India toil, so they might mingle with the dust and soil of India and become an indistinguishable part of India’. Taylor C. Sherman says this ‘request was a humble acknowledgement of his own relative insignificance’, but that it also makes India indistinguishable from Nehru. The iconography of the man was already indistinguishable from India. He was there at the moment the country gained its hard- fought independence. In a well known image, he stands at the Red Fort in New Delhi before crowds of thousands in August 1947.
The name Lalla Romano is not familiar to English readers. Despite being much acclaimed during her lifetime (and the recipient of Italy’s Strega Prize), works by the novelist, poet and painter have rarely made it out of her native language. Prior to A Silence Shared, masterfully translated by Brian Robert Moore, only one of Romano’s novels had been published in English: the quiet, eerie tale of a childhood revisited, The Penumbra. In A Silence Shared Romano demonstrates with understated economy why her work deserves to be read alongside other titans of 20th-century Italian literature such as Natalia Ginzburg, Cesare Pavese and Italo Calvino (all of whom knew and revered her). Her books are often heavily autobiographical and almost exclusively narrated in the first person.
Senior judges are often seen as being cloistered and aloof, carrying the heavy responsibility of incarcerating hundreds of people every year without having heard the clang of prison doors themselves. Lord Woolf is an exception. The former Lord Chief Justice (2000-5) was not only banged up as a student – after protesting over the banning of rag day – but volunteered as a senior judge to spend a night in jail. He and his wife surrendered their personal belongings and were shown into a cell in Brixton prison: ‘We then had the difficult decision to make as to who would occupy the top bunk and who the lower.’ It was, he recalls, ‘a memorable experience’, adding: ‘When the door closes behind you, you obtain a real sense of what imprisonment means. You do learn a lesson.
Nothing is less animate than a stone. There is little of significance in the random compounds that make up the Earth’s surface. They are useful, yes – for building, for metals and chemical yields – but they’re just stones. Yet throughout human history, the pebbles at our feet have exerted a fascination that goes far beyond the utilitarian. In Lapidarium, Hettie Judah delivers 60 far-reaching essays that explore the bizarre and revealing relationship between people and rocks. It begins with ochre, a ferrous pigment derived from clay and used in the earliest known example of expressive painting – a few lines on the wall of Blombos cave in South Africa, made 70,000 years ago.
The writer of contemporary history has a number of advantages over his colleagues who deal with the more distant past. It is not only that the profusion of media in recent decades supplies abundant first drafts of that history. There are also the twin forces of living witnesses and the author’s own memory. In this entertainingly written and generally even-handed account of roughly the first third of the reign of the late Queen – from her accession in 1952 to the arrival in Downing Street of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 – Matthew Engel deploys all of those forces.
One of the most beautiful spots I know in Britain is a steep-sided gorge in Devon where the River Dart carves through the Dartmoor rock on its way to the sea. The trees on either side are small, twisted and covered in ferns, mosses and lichens, so that even on a dull day the colours, shapes and textures are vibrant and dynamic. It was here that I took my wife shortly before she gave birth to our daughter. Nowhere I have been is more utterly beautiful and alive. This extraordinary place is a fragment of temperate rainforest: a rich assemblage of life made possible by ample rainfall, mild winters and damp summers.
A man is driving alone across America, under the passenger seat is an envelope containing a large chunk of cash. For reasons unclear, he’s desperate to erase himself; he avoids surveillance with the inspired agility of the truly paranoid. His urge to disappear, ‘to leave as illegible a mark as possible on the Earth’, leads him to a city, ‘big enough to be anonymous in’. The clever premise hooks the reader. Will our unnamed narrator contrive to live an untraced life? And why does he want to make this new life ‘a kind of spacewalk: to step outside the capsule, to cut the tether’? What, as he would say, is his ‘deal’?