Spectator Book Blog

Voices of the Taliban

Monday, 21st May 2012

Sun Tzu is responsible for the age-old cliché about knowing your enemy. I wonder, then, what he might have made of Poetry of the Taliban, edited by Alex Strick Van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn. This is a new collection of verses translated from Pashtun and Urdu. The poems originally appeared on Mujahedeen websites, in newsheets or on scraps of paper.

You might expect the poems to be reactionary or propagandistic — and, for sure, there is blood and thunder. But reviewers also talk of empathy, aesthetic sensibility and the familiar worries of young men in...

Across the literary pages: Bumper issues

David Blackburn

Monday, 21st May 2012

Across the literary pages: Bumper issues

It’s a fact of life: death and destruction make for compulsive reading. The latest tome in the apocalypse genre is Callum Roberts’s, Ocean of Life: How our seas and changing. The book describes how man has ravaged and defiled the oceans, and explains how our rapacious stewardship is damaging us. Thanks to over-fishing, fossil fuels and lax waste disposal, Roberts says, an aquatic catastrophe looms.

The Sunday Times gave Roberts a rave review (£). A man named Brian Schofield wrote:

‘There isn’t much optimism in Roberts’s conclusions regarding climate change and the...

Interview: Shin Dong-hyuk’s escape from Camp 14

David Blackburn

Friday, 18th May 2012

Interview: Shin Dong-hyuk’s escape from Camp 14

‘I did not know about sympathy or sadness. They educated us from birth so that we were not capable of normal human emotions. Now that I am out, I am learning to be emotional. I feel like I am becoming human.’

You may have heard of Shin Dong-hyuk, the man who feels he is becoming human. He is the only person born in a North Korean concentration camp to have escaped to the West. He was 23 when he fled. Ten years before, he betrayed his mother and older brother’s escape plans to a camp guard in...

The art of fiction: Carlos Fuentes

David Blackburn

Friday, 18th May 2012

The late Carlos Fuentes was a fluent English speaker — the product of being the son of a diplomat and his own careers in international academia and diplomacy. Here he is talking with Charlie Rose in February 2011. The interview captures the sense of how important politics was to Fuentes and the other writers of ‘El Boom’. The conversation is almost exclusively about politics past, present and future, touching on the drugs war, Cuba and U decline. Reference...

Audiobooks: the insomniac’s dream

Mark Mason

Thursday, 17th May 2012

I’ve recently been going to bed with Alan Bennett. He’s a very comforting presence as I drift off to sleep, his gentle voice soothing me with tales of what he’s been up to that day, or sometimes anecdotes from his long and successful past. It’s a real treat, the last thing I hear before nodding off being his mellifluous Yorkshire tones relating a Peter Cook one-liner from 1963.

I’m talking audiobooks, of course. There’s a nebulous point somewhere sleeping and wakefulness, a state where insomnia still reigns but you’re too tired actually to turn the light on...

Q&A obituary: Carlos Fuentes

David Blackburn

Thursday, 17th May 2012

What’s happened?

Carlos Fuentes died on Tuesday night.

Who was he?

He was a revered Mexican novelist, a crucial part of the literary movement in Latin America that came to be known as ‘El Boom’.

What was ‘El Boom’?

It was an artistic movement that emerged in the ‘60s. The writers were mavericks who defied the conventions of Latin American literature. They emphasised the modernist traits found in earlier European and American literature, and many of them experimented with form: they were exponents of magical realism, stream of consciousness...