Interconnect

Saturday

Interconnect

Rich man, poor man, communist, facist

From our UK edition

At the beginning, it was rather like a bizarre round of ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor’. Decca ran away to the Spanish civil war; Unity went to Munich and made friends with Hitler; Diana bolted with the founder of English Fascism and then went to prison; Pamela stayed at home; Debo ended up with Chatsworth; and Nancy wrote some very good books. The Mitford sisters’ fame originated, mostly, in newspaper scandals of the 1930s, to the horror of their parents, who believed that a gentlewoman’s name should appear in newspapers only twice, on her marriage and on her death. (According to Decca, Lady Redesdale grew to dread the sight of the words ‘Peer’s Daughter’ in newsprint, as well she might.

Interconnect

How did the Colosseum?

From our UK edition

Quid have we here? Nihil less than a smart parody of all the usual travel guides and one that manages to sustain its originality by delivering genuine, if often larky or unashamedly salacious, information about ancient Rome in a handy modern format. Provincial visitors, lugging their impedimenta up the Appian Way might have found it a useful vademecum while the Caesars were on the throne. Today’s 50-euro-a-day tourist will find it hardly less enlightening. Philip Matyszak both knows his stuff and manages to serve it in deliciae-sized portions. His guide honours all the usual categories of sights and pleasures and alerts travellers to the perennial dangers, not forgetting mislaid or misappropriated luggage on the way in (how much more reliable is Rome airport today?).

Interconnect

Small Room in a Hotel

From our UK edition

Small Room in a Hotel In this cool cube of marble I am valid but invisible As an image caught in a camera But not yet reproduced. My reappearance from confinement Is that of a lavatory Houdini Except that no one notices And the wonder is reduced to a trickle. How many men have died at stool, Bent in that vain rictus of hope That gives to their flushed features The terrifying squint of a Samurai? Between philosophical reflections And the final rebellion of blood Is the same fine line as between shadows And the ignorant earth which casts them. Why are we so eager for shadows? Is reality so hard to bear? That our root is in earth which Returns to earth, and is our sleep?

Interconnect

Patterns from the past

From our UK edition

Michael Ondaatje’s legion of admirers will not expect a novel constructed around a linear narrative, or even cohering in the developing consciousness of a central character. ‘Everything is collage,’ he tells us in Divisadero, a novel which is perhaps over-full of self-referential pointers. The work, we are led to infer, is like a ‘helicoidal’ spiralling belfry, or ‘like a villanelle … the way the villanelle’s form refuses to move forward in linear development’. It is like a ‘triptych’, offering parallel panels. ‘We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell,’ says one character (it hardly matters which).

Interconnect

Return to form

From our UK edition

Richard Russo is one of those writers, and they are many — indeed, they are most — whose work you may have read and enjoyed and yet whose name you may not instantly recognise. These are the stalwarts, the broad-shouldered, able-bodied men and women of literature, the workers, who for some reason lack that instant brand recognition that means the next time you’re in a bookshop or a library you’re going to head for their spot on the shelf to see what they’ve been up to lately. With his novel Empire Falls (2001) it looked as though Russo was about to emerge from obscurity into the sunny uplands of bookshop 3 for 2dom.

Interconnect

Good account of bad times

From our UK edition

Perhaps because he talks so much and has been in politics for so long, Roy Hattersley has the happy knack of making you believe that he was there at the events he describes. And if he wasn’t, he most certainly should have been, to the undeniable advantage of all concerned. For instance, the miners should have not had their war against the coalowners in 1926, precipitating the abortive General Strike, because it was the wrong time. Hattersley could have told them that, had it not happened six years before he was born. But by heavens, he tells them now. ‘It was a bad moment for the miners to choose,’ he intones gravely. They were ‘too proud for their own good,’ a fine old northern expression.

Interconnect

The final curtain?

From our UK edition

This is the ninth and final volume of the sequence, eliding fiction and autobiography, in which Philip Roth’s alter ego Nathan Zuckerman is narrator and protagonist. In the first volume, The Ghost Writer (1979), the still emergent author makes a pilgrimage of homage to a literary veteran, E. I. Lonoff, once highly praised for a novel of Jewish life and then all but forgotten when he puzzlingly fails to produce the expected successor. Lonoff enjoys a ménage à trois with a long-suffering wife and a mysterious foreign woman, Amy, his student and muse, to whom Zuckerman is instantly attracted and whom he half believes to be Anna Frank, living incognito in America. Now in Exit Ghost (stage direction from Hamlet), the series comes full circle.

Interconnect

A painter goes blind

From our UK edition

I was once given a poetry lesson by Kingsley Amis during which he said of unintentional rhymes and assonances in blank verse, ‘Never make the reader pause without profit.’ In The Model by Lars Saabye Christensen, the profitless pause count was wearyingly high. On page 3 and 4 the central character, Peter Wihl’s wife, is called Hélène, then on pages 5, 6, and 7 she is called Helena, then reverts to Hélène for the rest of the book. Why? In the first few pages Peter is in the garden with his daughter while it gets dark. Some time later Peter is painting in his studio when he notices that it is getting dark. This sort of thing keeps happening.

Interconnect

Black men in England

From our UK edition

Caryl Phillips has found his niche, as a master of historical ‘re-imaginings’. To blend real sources and fictional interpretations into a continuous narrative requires expert control, and he has it. Foreigners tells the heartbreaking stories of three black men struggling, and ultimately failing, to find their footing in England. It follows Dancing in the Dark (2005), which employed a similar hotchpotch of fictional and factual voices to tell the story of the black US entertainer Bert Williams. In the interim, Phillips has refined this distinctive technique to devastating effect. First up is Francis Barber, Samuel Johnson’s beloved servant, who was a former slave and ended his life ruined in an asylum despite having been left money by Johnson.

Interconnect

Sung Dynasty

From our UK edition

Sung Dynasty My lover tells me that when autumn comes He will fashion me a boat of cherry blossom: There’s no way I’m getting in that.

Interconnect

Where there’s a Will . . .

From our UK edition

Shakespeare may be the man of the previous millennium, but he is doing pretty well in the current one, too. Always at the heart of literary academia (inspiring around 4,000 books, monographs and other published studies each year), he has of late recaptured the general reader, thanks to an annual procession of well-received biographies from Shakespeare scholars such as Stanley Wells, Frank Kermode and Stephen Greenblatt, and from knowledgeable non-specialists such as Peter Ackroyd.

Interconnect

Was Anna Karenina always beautiful?

From our UK edition

It’s terribly distasteful and revolting. I am now going back to the boring and tasteless Anna Karenina, with the sole desire to finish and free up some time . . . I am fed up with my Anna; and am dealing with her as with a pupil who has turned out to be unmanageable. Everything is vile and all must be reworked and rewritten, everything that has been printed needs to be crossed out, dropped and disavowed. Such were the agonies of Leo Tolstoy about one of his two great novels, with whose central character, writes Viktor Shklovsky, the great man fell in love — as have many readers. Later he said, ‘I am proud of its architecture; the structure is unified not through plot or the relations of the characters, but through an inner unity.

Interconnect

Recent crime novels | 22 September 2007

From our UK edition

David Peace’s astringent novels inhabit the borderland between genre and mainstream fiction. His work includes the Red Riding Quartet and GB84 (winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize). Like its predecessors, Tokyo Year Zero (Faber, £16.99) is precisely grounded in its historical context — in this case Tokyo in August 1946, a year on from the Japanese surrender. The first of a projected trilogy, the novel deals with the murder of two young geishas strangled with their own shawls. Detective Minami of the beleaguered Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department is assigned the investigation, a task he accepts with what proves to be well-founded reluctance. The Department itself is in crisis, its personnel living in fear of another purge by the occupying authorities.

Interconnect

Alternative reading | 22 September 2007

From our UK edition

The stories of this volume are not so much stories, in the sense of having a plot and characters, but rather homilies, in which the dominant notes are anti-Zionism, anti-Americanism, and a rather nice line in irony (often directed against Muslim fundamentalists). One of the best is ‘The Suicide of the Astronaut’, in which a spacefarer returning from his wanderings finds that he is no longer suited for any earthly employment, and kills himself. The title story, ‘Escape to Hell’ (great title for Hollywood), is told in the voice of a Bedouin who finds that hell is more to his taste than modern urban life: I will now tell you the story of my experiences when I made that journey, that escape to hell.

Saturday

Interconnect

Don’t follow the herd

Ten days ago I went to one of London’s finest restaurants, the Lahore in Whitechapel. The place was packed with hundreds of eager punters. Ten days ago I went to one of London’s finest restaurants, the Lahore in Whitechapel. The place was packed with hundreds of eager punters. There were bankers from the City, large families of Asians, Essex chavs. We were served plate after plate, piled high with spiced fodder from a kitchen with a glass façade enabling you to see the troops of cooks preparing kebabs piled on coals, hundreds of pieces of dough turning into breads in a brick oven, and huge vats of bubbling chicken and lamb curries, vegetable concoctions and gigantic pans of rice. For those in the know, the Lahore is an institution.

Interconnect

This lethal golden elixir

From our UK edition

It used to be the taste of shame. Something that could induce nightmare Proustian flashbacks to teenage years of furtive pub trips and buying jumbo supermarket two-litre bottles. Never go back! And yet we all apparently have: this alcoholic madeleine is cider, and it appears that everyone loves it now, unreservedly, without any embarrassment. But this lethal golden elixir has evolved a little from the days when it was something to be drunk in parks, by the swings. Now it comes in all varieties, and vintages, and prices, in bottles with pretty labels, and is there to be found in smart gastro-pubs and at swanky dinner parties. Look at Waitrose, for heaven’s sake, ever the barometer of true social acceptability. Its shelves groan with delicious cider.

Interconnect

Spoiled for choice

From our UK edition

Was last weekend the most stirringly chock-full and eventful ever in sports broadcasting history? BBC Radio 5 heroically, breathlessly, covered the lot. Television viewers possessing the full works — satellite, terrestrial and all the trimmings — must have been frenziedly fingering their remote dibber like demented teenage girls texting myriad mates on their mobiles. For an all-embracing sports nut, Saturday teatime threw up an almost impossible challenge of choices: where did you begin with at the five o’clock kick-off — England football’s utterly crucial match at Wembley on BBC1, or gallant Northern Ireland in Latvia on Sky Sports? Or England rugby’s opening defence of their World Cup against USA in Lens on ITV?

Interconnect

Almost an Englishman

From our UK edition

Within this great mound of words (there are at least 200,000 of them) there is a rather good book lurking. Its first merit is that it is very well written. The style is easy, lively, fresh, vernacular. The writing is devoid of clichés and prefabricated prose. Secondly, the story it has to tell is pleasantly exotic. The author was born shortly after the end of the first world war in eastern Germany. His mother, Wilhelmine, was the daughter of a Yorkshire clothing manufacturer, memorably called Abimelech Wainwright, and his depressed wife Elizabeth, who appears to have said nothing during the later years of her life. His father, Albrecht von Blumenthal, was the youngest son of a minor noble family.

Saturday

Interconnect

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody | 25 August 2007

From our UK edition

Great to be back from hols to find the green shoots of Compassionate Conservatism sprouting again, thanks to Mr Redwood’s brilliant report. Well, we always said tax cuts were super-popular and deserved to be top of the agenda — and it turns out we were right! Monday Great to be back from hols to find the green shoots of Compassionate Conservatism sprouting again, thanks to Mr Redwood’s brilliant report. Well, we always said tax cuts were super-popular and deserved to be top of the agenda — and it turns out we were right! Now it’s just a simple question of translating it all into policy. As a first step we’ve had a team of top lawyers draft Dave’s response, so it’s fully watertight.

Saturday

Interconnect

Brimming over with music

From our UK edition

‘Hello, Gavin. Have you got the sackbuts with you?’ Administrative magician Rebecca Rickard is dealing with what is, for her, a fairly ordinary sort of phone call in the greater scheme of things. As it turns out, Gavin (Henderson) has indeed got no fewer than three sackbuts, and is planning to bring them with him the following morning on the London to Totnes train. Three musicians in this, the first week of the 60th Dartington International Summer School, will no doubt be duly grateful. The Summer School is a unique gathering point for musicians of every possible description and of varying standards of ability.