Spring is around the corner, and new books are flying onto the shelves.
The work of those Austro-Hungarians who followed in the wake of Franz Kafka is back in fashion. Stefan Zweig’s fiction is available in a new edition, as are the letters of his contemporary, Joseph Roth. A critical reappraisal of Roth is gathering pace. Writing in the pages, Philip Hensher has declared Roth’s The Radetzky March to be ‘a masterpiece of controlled, worldly irony which maintains a studious detachment.’ William Boyd took (£) a slightly different line in the Sunday Times:
‘In Roth’s work you have the same calm resignation in the face of the world’s vulgarities and injustice; the same celebration of its fleeting epiphanies; the same refusal to ¬condemn fellow human beings for their failings, shortcomings and inability to see what will actually make them relatively happy. But Roth in his life, unlike Chekhov, seemed incapable of finding that level of remove, of distance, that would provide some serenity. Where Chekhov approached his premature death with an almost saintly sang-froid Roth, on the evidence of these letters, is in near permanent turmoil.’
That turmoil, says Ian Thompson in the Telegraph, though it would eventually drive Roth to drink and an early grave, informed the fatalism and resignation of his fiction, and encouraged him to look back with nostalgia on Austria’s Hapsburg past.
A million miles away from Roth and Zweig, Sophie Kinsella has a new book out, I’ve Got Your Number. The Guardian’s Decca Aitkenhead has asked Kinsella about the trials and tribulations of the chick-lit writer:
‘I still struggle to understand why a woman of her intelligence would want to write about women at their silliest. I tell her I looked at her website, failed to find a sentence unadorned by an exclamation mark, and wondered how she could bear to channel the breathless hysteria of a teenager, gifting male critics with an excuse to dismiss her. “Do you know,” she says, smiling, “I don’t feel overlooked, cos I have a lot of readers who are loyal.”‘
The antidote to Kinsella, should you want one, is Angela Carter, whose friend Susannah Clapp has written a biography structured around the postcards they exchanged. Edmund Gordon talks to Clapp about an intimate work born out of separation.
Amid all of the Dickens celebrations, you might have missed Lawrence Durrell’s centenary. Has Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet endured? Asks Richard Davenport-Hines in the latest issue of the Spectator:
‘It is hard now to recapture the impact half a century ago of these novels’ heat, luxuriance and profanity. Redolent of Mediterranean beauty and squalor, with jokes about Horsham, Sidcup and Luton as reminders of English drabness, they exhilarated those who had chafed at the currency restrictions on foreign travel and the provincial-minded prudery of national censorship. One character speaks of ‘that grim air of unflinching desperation with which Anglo-Saxons embark upon their pleasures’. Durrell’s temptresses sip Pernod, read Vogue, use gold nail-varnish and enjoy sex.’
The Guardian podcast considers similar questions, and interviews Durrell’s daughter, Joanna Hodgkin, who has written an account of her parents’ stormy marriage. We’ll have a review of that book on the day of Durrell’s centenary, 27 February.
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