Simon Baker
It was a pretty undistinguished year for British fiction, but fortunately a good one for fiction elsewhere. Our Story Begins (Bloomsbury, £18.99), by Tobias Wolff, is a collection from one of America’s greatest literary talents of the last 30 years. Wolff is a writer of supreme grace and penetrating insight, and this moving, well-crafted and witty volume of new and selected stories threatens to exhaust a reader’s stock of laudatory adjectives.
My novel of the year is Pandora in the Congo (Canongate, £14.99), by the Spanish writer, Albert Sànchez Piñol. The second part (following 2005’s superb Cold Skin) of a loose trilogy whose keynote is a Swiftian exploration of man’s encounters with his own darker side, it is a homage to late-Empire, fantastical yarn-spinning, a story about our relationship with stories, and — somehow, in spite of its grotesquery and derring-do — a considered piece of literature. Indignation (Cape, £16.99), Philip Roth’s thousandth novel (approximately), deserves an honourable mention: slighter than his masterworks, it is nevertheless a plaintive and elegant book.
Robert Stewart
In the novel stakes three of the ante-post favourites, our brightest and best — Carey, Rushdie and Roth — found the ground hard-going, but coming up on the rails is Zoë Heller. The Believers (Penguin, £16.99), Roth-like in its intensity, is a savage comedy, a hymn to life’s hopelessness. Cricket finally makes it into serious fiction, in America of all places, where, in Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland (Fourth Estate, £14.99), it crashes along with other American dreams. I plugged John Laughland’s A History of Political Trials (Peter Lang, £12.99) in this magazine and I unhesitatingly do so again. It is critical reading for a generation hell-bent on dynamiting the bedrock that is the rule of law. The disappointment of the year was Alberto Manguel’s much-hyped The Library at Night (Yale, £18.99), in which a lot of interesting stuff struggles to stay afloat in a sea of narcissism.
Comments
Hannü
December 20th, 2008 10:01pmDialogues Tibetan Dialogues Han is a travelogue from Tibet as well as a book of conversations with dozens of Tibetans from all walks of life in Tibet on a wide range of subjects - the Dalai Lama, polyandry, sky & water burials, the Muslims, the Han, Tibetan mastiffs, aweto, languages, thangka, Buddhism, independence and more.
Published this year, it is the most democratic and down-to-earth book to have come out of Tibet in decades.
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richard milk
December 7th, 2008 3:35pm'vim, gusto and enthusiasm' mr hensher? that wouldn't be a spot of tautology, would it? please stop the pompous posturing - it almost reads as badly as your books.
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Lisa B.
November 26th, 2008 8:37pmThere's an unsung little book out there, quite politically incorrect and one publishers appear fearful of backing. It's called "Up Dog Street" and seems to be available only on Amazon.com. This little tome seems to be slowly gaining a life and a following of its own and the unique, but timely theme, seems the reason. It's a story about an immigrant who's lived in England most of his life, but he spends his days pining for the tundra left behind and condemning the foibles of democracy We all know a few). The author has a powerful voice (an immigrant to America herself) and conveys the idea that birthplace and lineage mean nothing and that "nurture" is everything. It was a great joy seeing how the protagonist "Carlo" in this story, ultimately finds his English soul, from Sussex nontheless.All Western democracies have a lesson to learn from this story.
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