Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Alastair Smart

Albers the austere

The German-born artist, Josef Albers, was a contrary so-and-so. Late in life, he was asked why — in the early 1960s — he had suddenly increased the size of works in his long-standing abstract series, ‘Homage to the Square’, from 16×16 inches to 48×48. Was it a response to the vastness of his adopted homeland, the United States? A reaction to the huge canvases used by the abstract expressionist painters in New York? ‘No, no,’ Albers replied. ‘It was just when we got a station wagon.’ In Charles Darwent’s new biography, Albers (1888–1976) comes across as a man as frill-free as the art for which he’s famous. Apparently, he held

George C. Herring

In cold blood | 18 October 2018

The 50th anniversary of the Vietnam war has produced an outpouring of books, along with Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s 18-hour television spectacular, which sparked in the United States yet another round of heated debate on the war. The journalist and military historian Max Hastings’s fast-paced and often compelling narrative will surely rank as one of the best products of this half-century reappraisal. Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy is a monumental undertaking. Many books analyse major Vietnam war policy decisions. Others discuss military operations; still others recount personal experiences. Hastings does all three in a single volume, although he gives greatest attention to the on-the-ground activities of North and South Vietnamese,

Anne Margaret Daniel

Jay for Japan

Haruki Murakami’s Killing Commendatore was published in Japan in February last year. Early press releases for this English version hailed the book as ‘a tour de force of love and loneliness, war and art — as well as a loving homage to The Great Gatsby’. Anyone familiar with Murakami’s 17 preceding novels can vouch for love and loneliness as his great themes; and war, art and F. Scott Fitzgerald are not new to him, but in Commendatore all enrapture. The narrator, a man with no name struggling with his own art — and, concurrently and inseparably, the women he sleeps with — recalls Murakami’s earlier nameless narrators, all the way

Stuart Kelly

Relocate or emigrate

There is a degree of irony in the opening chapter of T.M. Devine’s history, lambasting popular previous depictions of the Clearances and citing ludicrous comparisons to Nazi genocide and the misty-eyed melancholy of John Prebble. Though it does not mention such iconography as Thomas Faed’s painting ‘Last of the Clans’, used for the paperback of Prebble’s book, or Erskine Nicol’s ‘An Ejected Family’ in all its schmaltzy Victorian glory, such depictions are clearly the target. Yet the book itself is called The Scottish Clearances: A History of the Dispossessed and not, which would actually be more accurate, ‘Patterns of Land Ownership, Agricultural Change as well as Internal and External Migrations

Andrew Taylor

Kidnapped by Kett

Tombland is not to be treated lightly. Its length hints at its ambitions. Here is a Tudor epic disguised as a historical crime novel. C.J. Sansom’s ‘Shardlake’ series, of which this is the seventh episode, deals with the activities of a hunchbacked lawyer in the 1530s and 1540s. The bloated old king is now dead, and his son, Edward VI, a minor, rules through the Lord Protector, his uncle Somerset. England is in a parlous state — verging on bankruptcy after a disastrous Scottish war, uneasy with the new regime’s ultra-Protestant policies and on the brink of civil unrest. Shardlake has somehow managed to cling to his integrity, despite having

Louis Amis

Manic creations

American mass-incarceration is the most overt object of the ‘protest’ of this novel’s subtitle. The author, Sergio De La Pava, works as a public defender in New York City, and calls on an intimate secondhand knowledge of the many different sorrows to be found in the ripples of a single criminal case. But Lost Empress is also about other kinds of losses and limitations to human freedom. One minor character, a Colombian immigrant striving on behalf of his children, endures labour that ‘felt like a prison sentence’ or an ‘abyss’, opened up by ‘the desaturation of meaning’. He is killed in an accident early on; for his son, the grief

Lucy Mangan

Little women, big issues

The great thing about Louisa May Alcott’s classic Little Women is that it has something for everyone: stay-at-home types have the oldest of the March sisters, Meg, who struggles to reconcile her love of ease with both her responsibilities and the family’s genteel poverty (and does at least manage to have one night of fun at the Moffatts’ party, sipping their champagne with one hand and sporting her single good glove on the other, before settling down with a nice husband and even better linen cupboard); cool-slash-mean girls have Amy, who wrestles with vanity — not hugely successfully IMHO (Amy would be a demon with textspeak and indeed probably the

Tim Stanley

Capitalism in America: A History

Donald J. Trump has sparked some soul- searching among US historians: has this happened before? Does it mean America has changed? Cue the self-laceration, cue the book deals. Two impressive volumes illustrate both agreement and disagreement, both concurring that America represents the search for something — but the jury’s out as to precisely what. Capitalism in America: A History is by an Economist writer (Adrian Wooldridge) and a former chair of the Federal Reserve (Alan Greenspan), so you can guess where they’re coming from. The book celebrates the American thirst for self-improvement and argues that the country has long benefited from a ‘creative destruction’ driven by the market and entrepreneurs.

Thursday

Andrew Roberts

Diary – 11 October 2018

I’m giving 93 speeches over the next four months to promote my new book, Churchill: Walking with Destiny, but I don’t actually like public speaking. I enjoy it once it’s over, but not while it’s happening. I envy those writers of the 1970s who just got on with writing the next book as soon as the last one was finished. Once, at the Royal Hospital in Chelsea, a lady started her question, ‘You seem to be very ignorant, Dr Roberts.’ The Pensioners naturally roared with laughter. She was referring to my failure to have read the latest issue of a psychology journal that explained Adolf Hitler’s career in terms of

James Barr

Tory table talk

I bet that you are at best dimly aware of the Progress Trust, and that is what the members of this now-defunct fixture would have wanted. It was a misleadingly named group of comfortably off, often landed backbench Tory MPs, and its weekly discussions very rarely leaked. An unnamed member once explained why. ‘We have no shits,’ he said. The Trust, which would number Alec Douglas-Home and David Cameron, briefly, among its members, was secretive from the outset. It was established in 1943 to resume a more partisan style of politics, at a time when both main parties were still in theory committed to a ceasefire that the Conservatives felt

Alex Preston

Pithy and profound

It’s not surprising, perhaps, that Emil Cioran isn’t much read in England. Born in Romania, but winning a scholarship to the University of Berlin in 1933, Cioran was an avid supporter of both the Nazis and the Romanian far right group, the Iron Guard. His writing is bleakly nihilistic, his titles a hint to what lies within: On the Summits of Despair, A Short History of Decay, The Trouble With Being Born. Cioran was perhaps the greatest 20th-century practitioner of the aphorism, that ancient, fusty, patrician form associated with Hippocrates, Erasmus, de la Rochefoucauld and Pascal. Viewed in a certain light, though, a kind of mordant humour begins to emerge

Dea Birkett

Big cats and acrobats

We’re celebrating 250 years of circus this year. In 1768, the retired cavalryman and entrepreneur Philip Astley, together with his trick-rider wife Patty Jones (whose act was to gallop around the ring smothered in a swarm of bees) took a piece of rope, laid it in a circle on a piece of marshy land at London’s South Bank, and filled it with astonishing acts — tumblers, acrobats, jugglers, clowns. This was the very first circus. Every circus, anywhere in the world, began at that moment. The extraordinary new art form — a collection of street acts and horse tricks, infused with spectacle and risk and set in a circle —

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

What a demented dog teaches us about life

I met the late Darcy ten years ago, and wrote about him. I was 59 and he was 12. I was a Times columnist, and he was an Australian sheepdog. ‘Kelpies’ they call them: black and tan, in build and temper not unlike our border collies, energetic, intelligent, irrepressible but trainable, and occasionally neurotic. Darcy was not neurotic except in one pitiable respect, and I shall come to that. I studied him and wrote about him, but in the decade since have come to understand more deeply what his condition teaches about my own, and human, nature. I wrote about this dog as an oddity. I now see that Darcy

Katrina Gulliver

Stitches in time | 11 October 2018

I recently read a book in which the author, describing rural life in the early 19th century, casually mentioned clothing as being ‘all made in the home’. I laughed. Anyone who has ever tried to sew anything (let alone make an entire family’s wardrobe by hand) would not be so cavalier about the amount of labour involved. But it is typical of how a female trade tends to be dismissed as something anyone (well, women) can do in their spare time, as a picturesque hobby. Nobody similarly suggests that farmers in the 1800s made all their own furniture or saddles. But just like those items, clothing was made by people

Philip Womack

Passionate pursuits

André Aciman’s 2007 debut novel, Call Me By Your Name, was a sensuous, captivating account of the passionate love a cosmopolitan teenage boy bore for an older American man, which has since been made into an elegant and successful film, directed by Luca Guadagnino. For readers of all sexual persuasions, there was universality in young Elio’s desperation, the false starts and misreadings in his interactions with his desired; the consummation and the final disappointment. Love, unrequited or not, is something of an Aciman speciality, and he returns to it here in his fourth book, Enigma Variations. More of a collection of vignettes than a straightforward novel, it examines the emotional

Dominic Green Dominic Green

The scourge of the Raj

‘It’s a beautiful world if it wasn’t for Gandhi who is really a perfect nuisance,’ Lord Willingdon, Viceroy of India, wrote in 1933. Gandhi would have been 150 years old in 2019, had he taken better care of himself. He remains the most irritating and admired politician of the 20th century: a perfect subverter of power and political logic, but a nuisance to everyone, allies included. Only Hitler, the other anti-capitalist spiritual politician who broke the British Empire, fascinates to the same degree. The first volume of Ramachandra Guha’s biography, Gandhi Before India (2013), carried the young Gandhi across the British Empire from Kathiawar to London to Cape Town. In

Lee Langley

The man who disappeared | 11 October 2018

A novel by Javier Marías, as his millions of readers know, is never what it purports to be. Spain’s most eminent novelist, Nobel laureate in waiting, translated into more than 40 languages, Marías likes to play with existential ideas. The Infatuations was ostensibly a murder mystery; Thus Bad Begins chronicled a loss of innocence. But the stories are always interwoven with deliberations on truth, morality, deceit and the impossibility of knowing one another, with side trips through literature and history. Marías’s closeness to Cervantes, Proust and, above all, Sterne is no secret. Shandyesque digressions are among the incidental pleasures faithful readers have come to expect. Berta Isla is set largely

Philip Hensher

A mind going to waste

The revival of interest in mid-20th century novelists is one of the most positive and valuable developments of our time. This has particularly brought about a reconsideration of the work of women. Beginning, perhaps, with the creation of the Virago classics, female authors have been brought back into print and given the sort of serious treatment they rarely received in their lifetimes. The Virago list of classics is not what it was, but the excellent Persephone Press has carried on the task of rediscovering out-of-print authors. Occasionally, other mainstream presses have wondered whether a new readership might be found for names from the past, and Hodder is now trying its

Thursday

Gordon Corera

Betraying bandits

Spy stories, whether the stuff of fictional thrillers or, as in the case of Sergei Skripal, the real deal — often leave a question nagging. For all the tales of tradecraft and tension, double agents and drama, what difference did one person’s decision to spy really make? That is not the case with Oleg Gordievsky. Gordievsky’s story is remarkable because it has all the drama of a fictional tale and yet also conveys why a single person’s choices can make a difference. Gordievsky was a rising star in the KGB, but one who became disillusioned with the regime he was serving — particularly as he watched the crushing of the

Kapil Komireddi

India on the brink

Most religions bind their adherents into a community of believers. Hinduism segregates them into castes. And people excluded from the hierarchical caste system — the ‘untouchables’ — are permanently doomed to a life of scripturally sanctioned calvary. This hideousness doesn’t, however, hinder Shashi Tharoor from breathlessly exalting Hinduism as ‘a religion for the 21st century’. Having catalogued the Raj’s depredations in his previous book, Inglorious Empire, and demanded an apology from the current generation of British politicians for the crimes of their forbears, Tharoor, a prominent Indian parliamentarian from the opposition Congress party, declares in the introduction to Why I Am a Hindu that he will ‘make no apology’ for the