Culture

In a 2013 interview, Deborah Levy said: ‘Modernism is the soft typewriter of the womb that made me.’ But what made Modernism? My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein is Levy’s attempt to answer the question. In this novel, an unnamed narrator from London moves to Paris to write an ‘essay’ on Stein, the American patron of the avant-garde. There she meets Eva, an enigmatic illustrator whose blue eyes make everyone go ‘Awww’, and Fanny, a fashionable finance consultant with a thriving sex life. As the three search for Eva’s missing cat (originally called It and renamed Bob by Fanny), the narrator chases after Stein’s many trails but struggles to bring her into focus.

Greed, death, hate and clouds of destruction – this is the cormorant season all right. I was hungry to read Gordon McMullan’s book because I love the birds and looked forward to learning their secrets. But I gathered only a little about the green-glossy, serpentine jewel of a fowl I saw in Hebden Beck recently, hunting in the middle of town where I’d never seen it before. Look elsewhere for the creaturely particulars, such as the spur of bone at the back of the skull from which thick muscles link to the lower mandible, giving the corvus marinus a mighty bitey beak. This book is not concerned with what we know about cormorants but with the cormorants that we ourselves are.

This story is little more than a brutal anecdote, which Patrick Radden Keefe has chosen to tell at excessive length. It has the kind of fact-checked gravity that indicates a star American journalist bent on perpetrating an entire book. (‘Built in 1923 and originally known as the Empire Stadium, Wembley was the most iconic sporting ground in Britain.’) But it occurred to me more than once as I read it that it has the hallmarks of a particularly black London comedy by Dickens or Ben Jonson or Joe Orton. A violent knave, his activities previously limited to cheating the police, murdering his equally appalling criminal rivals, doing underhand deals and ripping off the rich, acquires an associate.

James Baldwin, like many American novelists before him, F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Dos Passos included, spent his formative years flitting restlessly between New York and Europe – New York being a source of fascination but also of creative burnout. He completed his first novel, Go Tell It On the Mountain (1953), not in Harlem, where he grew up and set the book, but in a Swiss chalet owned by the family of his then boyfriend, Lucien Happersberger. As he lived and worked in Loèche-les-Bains, Baldwin reasoned that the village children who shouted ‘neger’ at him did not mean to be unkind. They were simply curious and could never have known ‘the echoes this sound raises in me’.

In Ian Leslie’s John & Paul, the creative relationship between the titular Beatles is treated as a platonic love story. Matt Thorne widens the paradigm with seven more pairings, variously rivalrous, amorous, respectful, disrespectful and occasionally frankly tenuous. The 11 American and three British musicians here have careers that collectively cover seven decades of popular music. There are three dynamics at play. First, there are the Thucydides tensions, where a waning power tangles with a rising one. Frank Sinatra invites Elvis Presley to join him on a television show; Keith Richards throws a filmed concert with Chuck Berry. (Richards, for once, is the younger partner.) The older player is not always generous.

Consciousness is thought by many to define what it is to be human. We know that animals are conscious to some extent, but they don’t have what we have in that department. So if we can explain how human self-awareness works it will be a Rosetta Stone to understanding what makes our species so odd, or, depending on your view, so special. Also: big brains love exercise. And the great thing about this topic is that it can be tackled by biologists, neurologists, philosophers, physicists and even novelists. It’s an interdisciplinary, no-holds-barred intellectual wrestling match. Michael Pollan, an American journalist and academic who works at both Harvard and Berkeley, comes from a literature background but is fluent in the relevant science.