Book Reviews

Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Today

15 Apr 2021
Lee Langley

Ghosts of the past: The Field, by Robert Seethaler, reviewed

Give dead bones a voice and they speak volumes: George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo was clamorous with the departed having their say. Edgar Lee Masters, 100 years earlier, startled the American literary world with Spoon River Anthology, poems that were miniature autobiographies of the occupants of a small Illinois graveyard. Now, The Field by the Austrian novelist Robert Seethaler has the post-lifers of a German town delivering their own epitaphs. In a neglected corner of an old cemetery a man sits on a bench, listening to the people whose resting place this is. Who they were. The lives they led. Not damned souls from Dante’s circles, or creatures in limbo, but local citizens, focusing on a moment that shaped their life, or the moment it ended.

Ghosts of the past: The Field, by Robert Seethaler, reviewed

Yesterday

14 Apr 2021

Thursday

8 Apr 2021
Clare Mulley

Sleeping with the enemy: the wartime story of ‘La Chatte’

The name ‘Carré’ immediately evokes the shadowy world of espionage. Ironically, however, few people today have heard of the real Carré, also known as ‘Victoire’ and ‘La Chatte’, a female intelligence agent inside Nazi-occupied France whose life had enough plot twists and moral ambiguity to satisfy any spy novelist. Mathilde Carré (1908-2007) had beena clever but rather neglected child. Desperate to give her life meaning, and inspired by the poems of a patriotic aunt, she had romantically decided ‘at all costs, to die as a martyr for France’. Thirty years later, after a number of false starts, the second world war finally presented her with the chance to live a life of real value. Recruited by Roman Czerniawski, a Polish air force officer stranded in France, she became the crucial French linchpin for his Allied espionage ambitions.

Sleeping with the enemy: the wartime story of ‘La Chatte’
Chloë Ashby

A celebration of friendship: Common Ground, by Naomi Ishiguro, reviewed

Naomi Ishiguro began writing Common Ground in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum. The title refers to both Goshawk Common in Newford, Surrey, where 13-year-old Stanley Gower meets 16-year-old Charlie Wells, and the threads that bind the boys despite their differences. Stan isn’t a talker; he tends ‘to stay quiet and stare at people’, which, together with his second-hand clothes and his desire to learn, has made him a target at school.

Wednesday

7 Apr 2021
Martin Gayford

From temple to labyrinth — the art museum today

At a certain point, the critic Robert Hughes once noted, at the heart of American cities churches began to be replaced by museums. Much the same occurred elsewhere in the world in the later 20th and early 21st centuries. Museums have sprouted from the earth in many diverse forms and numerous places. Enormous sums have been lavished on them. Vast processions of visitors file through their doors like medieval pilgrims — or at least they did before the pandemic struck. Once, there was widespread agreement as to what should go inside these temples of the arts: old master paintings, ancient carvings, the best and noblest artefacts humanity has produced. This consensus, however, has evaporated. There is now little agreement, some would say little idea, as to what deserves to be exhibited, preserved and admired.

From temple to labyrinth — the art museum today

Thursday

1 Apr 2021
Julie Burchill
Julie Burchill

Must we always be treated as infants by a monstrous regiment of scolds?

What an awful title. Something we hacks are forever saying (along with ‘Make mine a double’ and ‘Is it still plagiarism if I change the names and set it in Singapore rather than Sheffield?’) is: ‘WE DON’T WRITE THE HEADLINES.’ How much worse, then, when it’s a book, and such an excellent one to boot: a right robust romp of a read — short but perfectly formed essays on how everything from bats to Best Picture has been weaponised by the monstrous regiment of modern scolds. Of course, nagging is nothing new. Quentin Letts believes it came to this country with the Norman Conquest, remarking on ‘the centralised bureaucracy of the Domesday Book... an explosion of red tape from which England has never quite recovered’.

Must we always be treated as infants by a monstrous regiment of scolds?
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