Culture

This pleasant volume, the author announces in the introduction, is ‘not a nature book, or even a travel book, so much as a book of fantasy: four small pilgrimages into imagination’. In its pages Nick Hunt unfurls his sleeping bag under a pink moon, breakfasts on a raw white onion and meditates both on what remains and on what we have lost. Outlandish is divided into four parts, each covering a short walk through a uniquely unusual landscape: Arctic tundra in the Cairngorms; a remnant of primeval forest straddling Poland and Belarus (‘the closest thing that Europe has to a true jungle’); the continent’s ‘only true desert’, in Spain’s south-eastern Andalucía; and the grassland steppes of Hungary. What unites the four?

Ever since Leonora Carrington, the last of the Surrealists, died in 2011, having made it to her 94th year with her creativity undimmed — like that other postwar English exile P.G. Wodehouse — her afterlife has reaffirmed the old maxim ‘Now that I’m dead I’m finally making a living’. Her collected short stories (as grotesquely funny and sharp as her paintings and their titles) were published on her centenary in 2017. So, too, was a biography by Joanna Moorhead which to most editors would barely have qualified as a proposal. It ran to just over 200 pages, written by a journalist who is ‘especially interested in relationships and family life’ — but didn’t discover until middle age that her second cousin was a world-famous painter.

Before Billy Wilder became the celebrated director of films such as Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot and The Apartment he was a busy jobbing screenwriter at UFA Studios in Berlin in the early 1930s, writing or co-writing the scenarios to more than 20 movies. And before that, he was a journalist. Starting in Vienna in the mid-1920s, where his earliest assignments included setting the crossword puzzle (a charming example is included in this volume), he quickly moved on to Berlin and became a prolific writer of occasional pieces for papers such as Der Querschnitt and the Berliner Börsen Courier. Selections of these articles have been published before but are long out of print, and were never translated into English.

In 2016, Arifa Akbar’s elder sister, Fauzia, died suddenly in the Royal Free Hospital, London at the age of 45. Until the last hours of her life, the cause of her coughing, chest pain, night sweats and breathlessness had eluded a series of baffled experts. But you do not need a medical degree to hazard a guess at what might have been behind these symptoms. From Keats’s famous death to the consumptive heroines of 19th-century opera, spots of blood on a handkerchief were all that was missing to complete the picture. Only after Fauzia had a catastrophic cerebral haemorrhage, however, did someone think to test a sample of her spinal fluid for tuberculosis. It was positive. Sense came too late. The mycobacteria had disseminated through her organs and were nesting in her brain.

Mircea Cartarescu likens his native Romania to a Latin American country stranded in eastern Europe. Certainly, his writing delivers not the pared-down parables and ironies of his self-exiled compatriot (and Nobel laureate) Herta Müller, but a rainbow-hued riot of fantasy, imagination and invention. The gender-switching narrator of ‘The Twins’ — one of five linked tales that make up Nostalgia — urges his lover to remember that ‘under the obscene rococo of our world and flesh, our bones are gothic and our spirit is gothic’. That feels about right, although Cartarescu fills his grotesque and hallucinatory scenes with tropical warmth, colour and light on top of the sepulchral chills of old Europe.